In defence of Lara Bird

No one cries for the death of the Tayside gentry. Beyond the mist-covered Instagram worship site known as Edinburgh and the professionally gruff Glasgow, for most people Scotland doesn’t exist until you reach the obligatory Highland layby photostop. In between these two zones is the place and society which made SNP MP Lara Bird, and the origin of her now infamous accents.

As she was sworn in as the representative for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, Bird’s strong Scottish accent caught the gallery’s attention. Soon, a video of her speaking about foreign policy on a Zoom call with a pristine English accent was posted to Twitter — and in words she would understand well, it began to blow a hoolie.

Conservatives immediately began to allege she was a sleekit leftist putting on a show. The Telegraph wrote, “this kind of code-switching comes naturally to many privately educated Leftists.” Bird only went to Dundee High, which is both literally and metaphorically a long way from Eton. Far from being an oasis of Received Pronunciation, the school is literally 100 metres from a Wetherspoons, which produces a choir of “Gavin, it’s not worth it. Leave him alone” every Friday night.

Bird’s accents are more the symptom of a genuinely diverse upbringing. Her full name, Pyla Lara Bird Leakey, suggests something interesting is going on. Her maternal grandfather was a “world authority on beans” and her father a distinguished soldier and diplomat. People from these lands between the silvery Tay and the Cairngorms used to run large parts of the world but now barely hold on to their estates as foreign investors swoop in.

Growing up affluent in Kirriemuir, she will have lived an almost dual existence. At home with English family or cousins who came up in the summers for the almost Highland air, she probably spoke with the accent used discussing Greenland on Zoom. When on the streets of Dundee, or beating the grouse out as a teenager with some farmhands, she will have spoken with her now Parliamentary timbre.

Bird told The Courier that she had “picked up a bit of an accent” in London, but the basic divide between her two different voices comes from sub-Highland Perthshire and Angus, where autumn is still announced by the sound of gunfire and the flutter of grouse.

Possessing these two accents, the next question is: does she pick between them? By crossing her fingers when declaring her oath to Britain and Scotland’s monarch, she certainly didn’t garner any sympathy. The truth is, like many of those from the weird rural world of golden fields, heathered hills and snowcapped horizons which stretch from Dunblane to Stonehaven, she won’t have a choice. You naturally mirror your accent to whoever your audience is. When surrounded by London’s giggling strategy consultants, you become one of the pack, perhaps only showing a glint of your provenance when saying Munro, dreich, or, after a whisky or two, Procurator Fiscal.

Code-switching is part of life for those like Broughty Ferry’s new MP, who straddle two different worlds

Fresh from a month campaigning in Arbroath, Bird will have passed the monument to the Declaration of Scottish Independence made in the town’s Abbey in 1320. This is strategically placed between two epicentres of Scottish life: the hospital and the McDonald’s. The declaration famously said that “so long as one hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule”. Reflecting on those words, even the most English of readers will be tempted to imitate a tartan twang. In Bird’s case, however, it is not an imitation but another language. Entering Parliament as an SNP MP, being surrounded by Scots is normally the best time to speak like a Scot.

Code-switching is part of life for those like Broughty Ferry’s new MP, who straddle two different worlds. Despite being traduced across X as being consciously deceitful and hiding her true accent, the truth is she doesn’t have one. Depending on the day, the hour and the company, she will never really have a voice. If she had gone to Glasgow University, she would have picked up that institution’s famed accent and merged, like many of my friends, into the public-sector-fed middle classes of the central belt.

Caught between the world of home and the rural society outside it, the class Bird belongs to used to use its lack of a single voice as a weapon. Brian Stewart, father of the MP-turned-podcaster Rory, grew up in Kirriemuir in similar circumstances to Bird, breaking up the Malayan insurgency on the way to becoming Assistant Chief of the Intelligence Services. Sadly shorn of the Empire it used to be its destiny to command, Perthshire and Angus’s gentry slowly migrated south, first to Edinburgh, then to London. Their former seats fall day by day into the hands of foreign investment firms and American magnates. An MP at 28, Bird is far more interesting than those who become estate agents or private security consultants.

There was a time when those like Bird served King and country. It is telling that Scotland’s latest MP doesn’t believe in either.