Yes, I’m an academic with an Essex accent. Stop mugging me off

The way we speak doesn’t signify our contribution to society, or our inferiority

It wasn’t much of a surprise to learn that research by Nottingham Trent and De Montford University has concluded that accent bias is still very much alive and well at the Bar.

Regional accent bias is a type of prejudice that is inflected by class, gender, and ethnicity. Jimmy Carr once joked that when talking to someone from the “regions” that he didn’t have a regional accent on account of his RP accent. Even though this was a joke, it reminds us how the presumed neutrality of RP casts “other” accents as culturally, intellectually and ethnically inferior.

An excellent example of a regional character in recent years is Gemma Collins, whose accent and appearance have marked her out as the archetypical “Essex Girl”; a slur that she successfully campaigned for the Oxford Dictionary to remove in 2020.