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Introducing the Individuals

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Former insurance professional

Voting record: Usually Conservative, apart from when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the SDP

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning rescuing people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Evie, 25, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, 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 six months, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

For starters

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

He: She came across as a very bright, articulate, nice person

She: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

Key disagreement

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. However I just disagree that the numbers are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I maintain that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on innovation

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

Steve: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were imported; since then it’s been service industry, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re using their oil. 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 require in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. 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 extremism coming here – he did note that a lot of the people in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on religion

He: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, 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 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 doesn’t like that word, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe community?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It appears a somewhat discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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