Elocution defeat

Picture: BBC

The things people get steamed up about, eh? I’m sure there are plenty of weightier matters for Lord Digby Jones to get peeved about than Alex Scott’s pronounced London accent, but the BBC Tokyo 2020 presenter and former Arsenal footballer’s elocution has properly riled the portly baron.

“Enough!”, the self-appointed Professor Higgins harrumphed on Twitter. “I can’t stand it anymore! Alex Scott spoils a good presentational job on the BBC Olympics Team with her very noticeable inability to pronounce her ‘g’s at the end of a word. Competitors are NOT taking part, Alex, in the fencin, rowin, boxin, kayakin, weightliftin & swimmin”. He then went on to call out Sky News political editor Beth Rigby and Priti Patel (amusingly conflating the two in his tweet by saying that Scott was “hot on the heels of Beth Rigby at Sky the Home Secretary for God’s sake! Can’t someone give these people elocution lessons?”.

Scott hit back, declaring that she was proud of her accent and her roots: “I’m from a working-class family in east London, Poplar, Tower Hamlets & I am PROUD. Proud of the young girl who overcame obstacles, and proud of my accent! It’s me, it’s my journey, my grit.” And she added: “A quick one to any young kids who may not have a certain kind of privilege in life. Never allow judgments on your class, accent, or appearance hold you back. Use your history to write your story. Keep striving, keep shining & don’t change for anyone.”

As if Digby hadn’t dug himself a deep enough hole, the former CBI director general and, briefly, government minister, then doubled-down on his original tweets by posting: “Alex Scott, please don’t play the working class card. You are worthy of much better than that! I admire & often publicly praise the adversity you faced & defeated to achieve all the success you deserve. Not sounding a ‘g’ at the end of a word is wrong; period. It’s not a question of class, it’s not a question of accent, it’s a question of poor elocution. Don’t let it spoil your otherwise excellent performance.” He didn’t just leave it there, either. When confronted by The Times, Jones said that he was “disappointed” with Scott’s reaction, adding that it wasn’t a matter of class. “I come from very modest beginnings in Birmingham. I got a scholarship to a public school; my parents never could have afforded to pay. It’s got nothing to do with it. It is about elocution and the fact it is inaccurate.” He dismissed the public reaction to his comments about Scott’s pronunciation, adding that “At last, someone’s talking about it”. Peak patronising gammon.

While I do grate at some of the political correctness the BBC goes in for, its approach to regional accents is not one of the things I care too much about. We’re a nation of almost 70 million people - why should one “received” accent be the only one that matters? Scott’s regional pronunciation is no different, in principle, to the former BBC political editor John Cole, whose rich Ulster accent was never considered a problem by anyone, as I recall, only getting a light ribbing in Private Eye, which spoofed his commentary with parody stories that always began with “Hondootedly…”. 

Likewise, does Scott’s One Show colleague Alex Jones get grief for her Welsh pronunciation of “moosic? Or what about the plethora of Scottish presenters down the years? Even Gary Lineker and Jeremy Clarkson have regional accents - the footballer’s Leicestershire vowels and Clarkson’s Yorkshire flattening occasionally revealing their origins. The list goes on, and Digby really should get over it.

Stephen Fry had a good point by saying the pompous patronising peer’s view on Scott was “everything linguists and true lovers of language despise”. The problem is that accents aside, Jones’ ridiculous moan has served as another painful salvo in the supposed culture war. Scott receives enough abuse as it is for being black and female, with social media’s anti-woke/anti-BBC hate brigade regularly branding her a box-ticking token (when false rumours circulated last year that she was replacing Sue Barker as presenter of A Question Of Sport, the bullies went into overdrive. When she was actually announced as Dan Walker’s replacement in Football Focus, there was even more misogynistic - and, yes, racist - shit directed her way).

Picture: The Times

Scott has become an unlikely and unfortunate lightning rod in the cultural divide that’s been allowed to fester in Britain in recent years by the political classes. It’s the same war that has Labour Party deputy leader Angela Rayner branded “thick as mince”, simply for having a strong Lancashire accent and having been a single mother at a young age. Somehow it has become ingrained that a regional accent equates to its owner’s intellect, and that only the plummy-voweled have any right to be in positions of authority. In broadcasting it’s even worse, as if anyone on camera or with a microphone should conform to Reithian ideals, of continuity announcers in dinner jackets and ballgowns. It’s true that until not that long ago the BBC appeared to be largely voiced by purveyors of so-called “received English”, but not exclusively: Michael Parkinson, for example, had a prime-time Saturday night chat show, and yet spoke with a Yorkshire burr, as did John Noakes on Blue Peter.

What makes me applaud Alex Scott is that she hasn’t tried to modify her accent, as so many do in public life, such is the apparent stigma of sounding regional (I was always shocked to discover that Kate Adie comes from Northumberland). The sad fact is that people with provincial accents are still perceived as being less intelligent. A recent University of Essex study found that, that anyone speaking with an apparent working-class accent was judged less intelligent, friendly and even trustworthy than middle-class people when reading aloud. The same applied to people from minority ethnic backgrounds.

“The link that people make between accents and competency is something we need to break down,” Dr Amanda Cole, who led the Essex study, told The Times. “An accent reflects where we’re from, our class, our ethnicity, our identity. So to criticise someone’s accent is a veiled criticism of those different social factors.”

So on that learned note, let me end this post with a screenshot of Lord Digby Jones’ Wikipedia entry, as of yesterday (it has since been edited...), which some enterprising scamp had updated to reflect his ridiculous attack on Scott.