Given Jack Whitehall’s ‘Wetherspoons Whitney’ comment to Becky Hill, I thought I’d touch on accent discrimination.

It’s not something I’ve talked about much, this idea of accent discrimination, or the deeper divide that still exists between the North and South of England. Growing up in the North, I never gave my accent a second thought. It was just how we all spoke, part of the background noise of everyday life. But as soon as I headed South at 21, everything changed. Suddenly, the way I spoke marked me out. I wasn’t one of them. I didn’t sound like I belonged.

There’s a subtle but constant pressure to conform when you’re in a place where your voice doesn’t fit. People laugh at different things. The jokes don’t always land, or worse they do, and you’re the punchline. The humour, the pace, the rhythm of speech it’s all just a bit off when compared to what I was used to. And when your accent is different, people often assume other things about you too, that you’re less intelligent, less cultured, less capable. They might not say it out loud, but you feel it in the way they look at you, the way they listen, or don’t.

Despite all that, I never tried to change the way I spoke. I’ve always found comfort in making people laugh, and humour, especially the darker kind has been a lifeline through difficult times. It’s a way of reclaiming space in conversations where you might otherwise feel small or dismissed. But the truth is, when you’re behind closed doors, when the lights are off and the curtains are drawn, those little moments of exclusion can catch up with you. That’s when the self-doubt creeps in. You start to question your own worth. You feel out of place. Less educated. Less refined. Like you’re always one step behind.

That’s part of why I made a conscious decision to raise my children in the South. I wanted to give them a smoother start, one where their voice wouldn’t betray them before they even finished a sentence. They speak with a more neutral, middle-class accent, and with that comes a kind of invisibility that I never had. I didn’t want them to feel the need to justify their intelligence or their belonging because of how they sound. I exposed them to different cultures raising them in London, encouraged curiosity, and let them form their own opinions about the world.

Final thoughts:

Growing up Northern, you learn that nothing comes easy, you’ve got to graft twice as hard for half the recognition. And if you dare head down South, you’re already at a disadvantage. To them, we’re the dregs of humanity, the clueless ones, the ones who’ll never quite measure up.