The SNP’s newest MP, Lara Bird – who crossed her fingers this week when pledging allegiance to the King – has been exposed as switching her accent from English to Scottish depending on whom she is addressing. The Telegraph has more.
As Lara Bird was being sworn in as the SNP’s MP for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry on Monday, she crossed her fingers as she pledged allegiance to the King.
Now, past videos reveal another way in which Bird, 28, is not quite as she first presents. Videos doing the rounds on social media show that she has (at least) two very different accents, depending on the occasion.
When she needs to, she can deploy an impeccable Received Pronunciation. In a video posted to her Instagram account in January, she offered an explainer on the Venezuela-US crisis in which her accent might have been mistaken for Keira Knightley’s.
The same accent was on display in an interview with the Britain Palestine Project, in which she calls for “recognition of their state, a state that already exists, a state that has existed for longer than the state of Israel has”. You would have thought she was fresh out of Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
In the House of Commons, however, her voice was more Trainspotting than St Trinian’s. “I take this oath only so that I can serve the people of Arbroath and Broughty Ferry,” she said. “My first allegiance is and always will be the sovereign people of Scotland.”
She went on: “I do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors, according to the law, so help me God.” Coupled with a grimly sarcastic expression, it sounded more like she was offering the monarch a square go in a rough pub in Dundee.
This kind of code-switching comes naturally to many privately educated Leftists, who find themselves often having to address people very different from the ones they grew up around.
Worth reading in full.
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I suppose it’s proof positive, if ever it were needed, that you don’t have to be particularly mature (or sane) to make it as a lefty politician… There’s a parallel here, and she’s called Hannah Spencer (of the Greens), who speaks in either English or Urdu depending on who she’s addressing.
Leftism = Ends Justify Means. So, deception in the service of socialism is all fine and dandy. (See also: Taqiyya)
Bilingual
I grew up speaking without an accent, but was able to speak the accent of my father’s family in a different part of the country. It was a process of assimilation.
i don’t actually see anything wrong with it.
I’ve done it too. Went to a wedding in Liverpool and came back with a scouse twang for a few days, It’s ’protective colouration’, like a chameleon. It just helps you fit in with the environment you’re in.
Shes explained it, anyway, as a result of her upbringing: mother in London, father in Scotland… seriously, if you’re going to find fault, there’s much more to question than how she speaks.
It never happens to Keir Starmer, because for somebody who sounds remarkably like “Zippy” (Combine a southern RP with Kermit the Frog, or that character from FoneJacker – Brian something-or-other), he’s not capable of doing any other voice than his own, droning monotone.
No different to Kemi Badenoch who when speaking to her fellow Nigerians strangely has a broad Nigerian accent.
Yes, and when Ed Millband addresses his fellow Martians…
We’re definitely sure it wasn’t a Klingon insult to the Vulcans?
It’s childish enough…
She resembles a Klingon and it looks like she’s doing the inverse of what Spock would do as a greeting. It’s what we used to call a joke, before feminists destroyed society.
Pyla Lara Bird-Leakey, to give her her full name, is definitely ane o’ us, ken?
Seriously Arbroath, have you been sniffing marker pens? 🤦♂️
Yet another fraud in the H of C.
Not many on here will share my view but Mrs Badenoch is doing a great job of channelling the anger that so many of us in the country at large feel about this government.
The shambolic actions of this incompetent irresponsible and mendacious government are sn utter disgrace; antipathetic to the best interests of the nation, its national security; only interested in their own survival, the continuation of their taxpayer funded stipends.
I’ve been calling treason since the time of Bozo and all except Liz Truss have continued in the same vein.
She might be, but she won’t get many votes.
Very funny! One commenter said that her Parliamentary oath sounded like a stroppy teenager forced to apologize to the teacher in front of the class.
Exactly what I was thinking. It’s the body language of an adolescent teen having been told: “You WILL swear and oath and you WILL mean it!”
So does she need a nickname? Lyre Bird perhaps?
Love that.
A Welsh friend of mine switched from Welsh to London accent depending on who he was with, but he had grown up partly in Wales then needed to learn Cockney to stop getting the crap beaten out of him. Probably not quite the same case as this lady.
I’m Welsh: I slow down when speaking to non-Welsh people and enunciate differently, but Nobody’s ever failed to spot that I’m Welsh, from my accent. I am also able to adopt accents but that’s not a courtesy, it’s a pretence.
Yes a pretence unless someone is genuinely rooted in multiple languages or accents.
Doesn’t it depend what you mean by “fake”? Using different languages, and accents, may depend on the audience it is aimed at.
Well, I can’t think of a precedent. Can you? Of course we may tweak our language and display various idiosyncratic variations of tone and theme, but to flip your basic accent back and forth from English to Scottish is either a bad case of SPD or just brazen fakery. And of course one may speak in foreign languages if addressing a foreign audience. But why on God’s earth would you speak one language in a different accent? Very weird behaviour.