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Introducing the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Usually Tory, except when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have activated the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her home country, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was half a year, which is a significant duration to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She seemed like a very intelligent, well-spoken, nice person

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

The big beef

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who already live here, not just Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the essential services, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the numbers are that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I believe that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without raising wages. Wages are kept low, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on child support, on schooling, on technology

Eva: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the country they came from

He: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were imported; since then it’s been hospitality, farms. 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 alternative power, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, 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 energy revenues soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity 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 advancing to greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on faith

He: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, 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 gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe enclave?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It appears a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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