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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Usually Tory, apart from when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her home country, New Zealand, 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

For starters

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

Steve: She seemed like a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

Eva: 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 reduced. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, including non-white white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to occupy positions 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 – allocate additional funds on child support, on schooling, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – people could come here and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were imported; since then it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

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 skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

Eva: 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 require in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

For afters

Eva: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about 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 discriminatory to make judgments based on religion

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: full of yuppies. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People stare at me because it’s become very Muslim. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word segregated area. 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 theirs.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the media as doing things wrong. It appears a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

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