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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Usually Conservative, apart from when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and supported the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, New Zealand, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was six months, which is a long time to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

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

She: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

The big beef

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who already live here, not just Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I believe that governments have used immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and abroad when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about “posted workers” – candidates could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the their nation of origin

He: Macron 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 British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been service industry, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Common ground

He: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, 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 soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach 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 kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, windfarms 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 many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

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 modernized. Obviously, 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 Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

Eva: I believe that followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the media as doing things wrong. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

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