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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired underwriter

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

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, New Zealand, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

Initial impressions

Eva: Steve appeared focused on enjoying the meal, to be receptive

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

Eva: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

Key disagreement

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white white British, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are entering. However I just don’t think the numbers 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 maintain that authorities have exploited immigration to occupy positions 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 – allocate additional funds on childcare, on schooling, on technology

Eva: I am not deeply informed 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 salary of the country they came from

He: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; 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 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 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 Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build eco-friendly systems

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling 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 moving towards environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and water power

For afters

She: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did note that a many individuals in the Arab world were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

Steve: I hail from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been gentrified. Naturally, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down that local market, I look like a foreigner. People stare at me because it’s become very Muslim. She had a little look 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 their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

She: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It appears a little bit discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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