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Introducing the Participants

Steve, 64, Essex

Occupation: Former insurance professional

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

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Evie, 25, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her home country, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was six months, which is a long time to be on a boat

For starters

She: Steve appeared there to have a nice time, to be receptive

He: She seemed like a very bright, articulate, nice person

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

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who already live here, not just white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas 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 can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – 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 different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was revised in 2018. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, I love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they used that money 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 in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll need in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a lot of the people in the Arab world were radical, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on faith

He: I hail from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. People stare 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 Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

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