🔗 Share this article

Introducing the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Tory, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Evie, 25, London

Profession: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her home country, New Zealand, she supported both Labour and Green

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

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

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

She: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

Key disagreement

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who are native to the area, not just white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are entering. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are so problematic

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Wages are kept low, so levies have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on innovation

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and abroad when it happened. He clarified it to me in a new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could come here and only be paid the salary of the their nation of origin

Steve: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, transition from fossil fuels. I disapprove of environmental harm, 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 Norway?” Their oil and gas profits soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. 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 coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, windfarms and water power

For afters

She: We touched on Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by 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 discriminatory 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 that local market, I appear out of place. People gaze at me because it’s become very Muslim. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as engaging in misconduct. It appears a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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