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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Typically Tory, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her home country, New Zealand, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a long time to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

He: She came across as a very bright, well-spoken, pleasant person

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

The big beef

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that UK residents 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. However I just disagree that the numbers are that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that authorities have exploited immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages 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

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it happened. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Common ground

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, 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 skyrocketed after the conflict began, they used that money to develop green infrastructure

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount we’ll need in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

For afters

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on faith

Steve: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down that local market, I appear out of place. People stare 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 Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

He: I think we separated amicably. We had a hug at the station

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