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Introducing the Individuals

Stephen, 64, Essex

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Tory, except when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the Social Democratic Party

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

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

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

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was half a year, which is a long time to be at sea

For starters

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

Steve: She came across as a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, 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 UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the essential services, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are so problematic

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so levies have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on child support, on schooling, on technology

She: 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 new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Common ground

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, 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 the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues soared after the conflict began, 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 supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll require in the future. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, turbine fields 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 Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

He: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I appear out of place. People gaze at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe enclave?

She: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as engaging in misconduct. It appears a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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