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Introducing the Individuals

Steve, 64, Essex

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

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

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Evie, 25, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, New Zealand, she supported both progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was half a year, which is a long time to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

He: She seemed like a very bright, well-spoken, pleasant person

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

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that UK residents who are native to the area, not just white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. However I just disagree that the numbers are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I believe that authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so levies have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on technology

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He told me about “posted workers” – candidates could come here and only be paid the salary of the their nation of origin

He: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they used that money to build green infrastructure

She: 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 limited quantity 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 greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

Steve: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been gentrified. Naturally, 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 “ghetto”. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe enclave?

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

Conclusion

Steve: I think we parted on good terms. We had a hug at the station

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