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Introducing the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Former underwriter

Political history: Usually Tory, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re planning rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have activated the missile silos”

Evie, 25, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a significant duration to be at sea

Initial impressions

Eva: Steve seemed focused on enjoying the meal, to be open

He: She came across as a very intelligent, well-spoken, nice person

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

Key disagreement

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who already live here, not just white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. However I just don’t think the figures are that bad

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without raising wages. Wages are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He clarified it to me in a new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – people could come here and only be paid the wage of the country they came from

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

He: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. 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 the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after the conflict began, they used that money to build eco-friendly systems

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll need in the future. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, windfarms and water power

For afters

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did note that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

He: 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 that local market, I look like a foreigner. People stare at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like Muslim people are really overrepresented in the media as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

Steve: I think we separated amicably. We had a hug at the train stop

Eva: We both said that we’d had a lovely time