Speaking Propa

Looking back, I think my Dad had a touch of the Henry Higgins about him. Like the Professor in Pygmalion, he was keen that my brothers and I should talk ‘propa’. No ‘aints’ and ‘innits’ were tolerated - ever. This unyielding stance was all the more surprising as my Dad was an immigrant for whom English was very much his second language. A small man, with a large round belly and an easy smile, he was rarely seen wearing anything other than a three piece suit. He had a great capacity for love and joy; the entire room seemed to shake when he laughed but he could also be a strict disciplinarian. It was always easier to please him and so I grew up to speak ‘RP’ - Received Pronunciation.

According to Brittanica (the Encyclopaedia of yore), the term Received Pronunciation dates back to 1869 and was coined by phonetician AJ Ellis. He used it to describe an accent found “all over the country, not widely differing in any particular locality…as the educated pronunciation of the metropolis, of the court, the pulpit and the bar.” It was also associated with public schools and in 1922 the BBC chose RP as its broadcasting standard.

The glaring upper/middle class and southern bias of RP,  is uncomfortable; it clearly wasn’t about inclusivity or respecting or preserving regional accents. The accent itself has evolved ( just listen to clips from the BBC archive from even the 1980s and you can hear how much RP has changed) and so have attitudes towards accents. Amol Rajan and I have discussed his frustration with the BBC’s ‘posh accent’ bias - although his South London twang has quite rightly not held him back. But I’m certain, there’s no way the BBC would have put me on the airwaves back in the 1990s if I hadn’t spoken the way I do. Something I think my aspirational but not especially educated immigrant father implicitly understood.

And predictably, that accent has done me some favours over the years. At primary school, a long-standing bully called Robert, intervened on my behalf, against a new arrival preparing to duff me up with the unforgettable line ‘She ain’t a P***i she’s just got a suntan.’ Under the circumstances, I wasn’t about to disagree. I got a Saturday job in a china shop on Regent Street in London’s West End because the manager liked that I was ‘well spoken.’ My accent became a shield, which overrode assumptions about my ethnicity and the colour of my skin.

Up to a point that is. I haven’t entirely escaped the verbal assault or the racist diatribe. For instance, as a teenager, I was at a friend’s birthday lunch. Her mother turned on me when I politely said I couldn’t eat the meat (something she had been told in advance) as I was vegetarian. My explanation, that this was for religious and cultural reasons, provoked a rant questioning my patriotism and railing against foreigners who come here etc. I was too young and too frightened to say anything. My friend’s older sisters hustled their mother out of the room as quickly as they could. Life and the lunch, went on.

I am acutely aware that many people have had to endure much much worse. Cases like that of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence are constant a reminder that race hate has never been far from the surface. Having said that, over the last thirty years, I thought as a country, while racism was far from eradicated, we were learning to live together, to accommodate if not wholly accept, diversity. It wasn’t perfect but we were rubbing along.

I no longer think that.

My doubts began to stir before the Brexit Referendum. A BBC colleague made a TV programme about immigration, specifically how arrivals from Eastern Europe were proving to be too much for certain communities. And because these people were white and Christian, it wasn’t racism but an open conversation about mass immigration.

The programme was seen to be central to informing the debate around the upcoming referendum and so I found myself interviewing my colleague about it. In the few moments before we went live, I highlighted my discomfort, pointing out that no one seemed to notice that we were normalising the ‘othering’ of minority groups. There was one difference in the Eastern Europeans favour. Over time, those who chose to remain in the UK, would become virtually invisible, with no one any wiser about who they were or where they had come from. Their children would speak without an accent and the only giveaway of their roots might be their surname. But in that moment, by accepting the premise that they were the problem and failing to point to the other economic and societal factors which might also be at play, we were opening the door to vocal opposition to anyone who didn’t qualify as ‘white British’. That seemed to me to be the top of a very slippery downhill slope; no matter what my accent was like, my skin colour would always set me apart. I would never ‘fade into the background’. My brief exposition was met with blank incomprehension from my colleague.

Fast forward to August 2024. Anti immigration riots broke out in English towns and cities. The spark was the horrific murder of three little girls in Southport by a man who was falsely rumoured to be an asylum seeker. In recent weeks we have seen violent protests outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Epping in Essex. Here, the trigger was an asylum seeker being charged with sexual offences against a young girl.

The arguments, unhappiness and some chilling views following the events in Epping were captured well in this article by Ros Wynne-Jones

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/i-predicted-riots-before-southport-35613002

She summarises some of the unrest which has played out since last year:

“As the anniversary of the disorder approaches…pockets of disorder have followed riots in Ballymena, Northern Ireland. This week saw unrest in genteel Diss in Norfolk, protests in London's Canary Wharf, as well as in Epping. Fanning the flames, this week…. Reform leader Nigel Farage warned of "societal collapse.”

Really? Is it societal collapse or perhaps it’s grievance being stoked until it erupts in anger? The last time I looked, Epping seemed pretty affluent to me, as is much of Canary Wharf.   

Nigel Farage is always careful to avoid crude white nationalism.  He is a natural communicator and a shrewd tactician. But the rhetoric of the far right is being mainstreamed - it may begin online but we are becoming more and more used to its shrill and sometimes violent tone throughout our discourse.

For someone who is born and bred in the UK, it’s hard to describe how depressing this moment feels. I am not seeking to minimise the concerns or fears of those who object to migrants/asylum seekers being housed in their midst. Pressures on housing, online rumours about sexual offences committed by immigrants and anger about the grooming scandal have all contributed to the heightened tensions. A report this month from the think tank British Future and the Belong Network for the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion found that a year on from the riots of 2024, there is widespread anti Muslim sentiment and that ‘a tinderbox of long term social pressures and grievances - including polarisation, declining political trust and economic pessimism - remain unaddressed in towns and cities across the UK.’ I recognise and acknowledge that there are real issues

(as well as baseless online stirring) which need to be addressed but I am horrified that anyone thinks burning down the buildings in which migrants are sheltering is the answer. And if it’s migrants in a hotel being targeted today, who’s to say it won’t be some other minority going about its business tomorrow?

Minorities are easy targets because they stand out - the kippah, the hijab, the saree, oh and let’s not forget skin colour.  We’re easy prey for bullies and thugs, especially in a world in which such things are normalised. And if that is the case, it makes me wonder why anyone should bother to integrate? Why attempt to blend the shape and flavour of your own heritage with the mainstream if that mainstream now demands something like complete surrender? Surrender to what, I’m not entirely sure.

I have been a beneficiary of the tolerance and inclusivity that has until now, grown throughout my lifetime. But we seem to be sliding away from that way of being. With my ‘posh’ RP accent, my career in news and now classical music - I’m about as integrated as it’s possible to be without actually changing colour. But if it’s okay to attack migrants today, how long before they come for me, with or without my RP accent?