🔗 Share this article

Introducing the Participants

Stephen, 64, Essex

Occupation: Former underwriter

Political history: Usually Tory, apart from when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and supported the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have activated the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her home country, New Zealand, she supported both progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a significant duration to be at sea

Initial impressions

She: Steve seemed there to have a nice time, to be open

He: She seemed like a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

The big beef

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who already live here, not just Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because more and more people are entering. Whereas I just don’t think the numbers are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I maintain that authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on child support, on schooling, on technology

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and abroad when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about “posted workers” – people could come here and receive solely the salary of the country they came from

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; since then it’s been service industry, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build eco-friendly systems

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll need in the future. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, windfarms and water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in the Arab world were radical, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

Steve: I hail from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People stare at me because it’s become very Muslim. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a somewhat discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

Steve: I think we parted on good terms. We had a hug at the station

She: We both said that we’d had a wonderful evening