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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, 64, Essex

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Conservative, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and supported the SDP

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

Eva, 25, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, New Zealand, she supported both Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

For starters

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

Steve: She came across as a very bright, well-spoken, nice person

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

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that UK residents who already live here, not just Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. However I just disagree that the numbers are so problematic

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without raising wages. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and not living here when it occurred. He explained it to me in a new light. He told me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the country they came from

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in 2018. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; since then it’s been service industry, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

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 appreciate rural areas. 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 used that money to develop green infrastructure

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll require in the future. 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, windfarms and water power

For afters

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did note that a lot of the people in the Arab world were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments 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: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. People gaze 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 Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It appears a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

Steve: 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