🔗 Share this article

Introducing the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Usually Tory, except when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the SDP

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing rescuing people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, 25, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

Voting record: 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 half a year, which is a long time to be at sea

For starters

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

Steve: She came across as a very bright, articulate, pleasant person

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

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that UK residents who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are entering. However I just don’t think the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I believe that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without raising wages. Wages are kept low, so levies have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on technology

Eva: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could come here and only be paid the salary of the country they came from

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in 2018. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. 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 Ukraine started, they allocated those funds 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 in favour 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 use planes. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We touched on Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did note that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

Steve: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Naturally, 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 very Muslim. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she doesn’t like that word, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

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

Takeaway

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

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