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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Usually Tory, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the SDP

Interesting fact: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re planning rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, New Zealand, she supported both progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a significant duration to be at sea

For starters

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

He: She seemed like a very intelligent, articulate, pleasant person

She: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

The big beef

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the essential services, because more and more people are arriving. However I just disagree that 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 warm beer. But I maintain that authorities have exploited immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on innovation

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the country they came from

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; since then 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, transition from fossil fuels. 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 oil and gas profits soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll need in the future. 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

For afters

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

Steve: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People gaze 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 Polish-Jewish ancestry – she doesn’t like that word, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit racist, or xenophobic

Conclusion

He: I think we separated amicably. We had a hug at the station

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