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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Typically Conservative, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Profession: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her native land, New Zealand, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was six months, which is a long time to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She seemed like a very bright, articulate, pleasant person

Eva: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

Key disagreement

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are so problematic

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so levies have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on child support, on education, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and not living here when it happened. He explained it to me in a new light. He told me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Common ground

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll need in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and water power

For afters

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did mention that a lot of the people in the Arab world were radical, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

He: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People gaze at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. 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?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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