How did the era of ‘be yourself’ produce so many pretending to be what they’re not?

United States senator Elizabeth Warren apologised in 2019 for claiming to be an American Indian on official documents in the 1980s.

The Massachusetts Democrat, who is white, was condemned by the Cherokee Nation for trying to identify herself into tribal membership off the back of a DNA test suggesting a small, distant trace of Native heritage.

The same year saw Dublin-based blogger Marie Sophie Hingst come under scrutiny for her claims to be Jewish and to have lost relatives in the Holocaust. She was, in fact, a German Protestant.

Most infamous of all is the case of Rachel Dolezal, the ‘black’ lecturer in African-American studies who was revealed in 2015 to be a white woman with no African heritage who had darkened her skin to ‘pass’ for black.

She explained to The Guardian at the time: ‘If somebody asked me how I identify, I identify as black. Nothing about whiteness describes who I am.’

These incidents come to mind amid the row over Pyla Lara Bird-Leakey, the new SNP MP who prefers to be known as Lara Bird (So would you if your full name sounded like a minor character on Downton Abbey).

Bird, hitherto a doctoral student in international law, is accused of Jocking up her accent for her swearing-in at the House of Commons. 

Her online detractors have dug up old videos of the Arbroath and Broughty Ferry MP, who is of mixed English and Scottish ancestry, and assert that her accent was more English before she stood in the recent by-election for the Nationalists.

So, is she another identity-faker — a Rachel McDolezal?

I’m not so sure. I’ve never met the woman but, having watched the various videos available, it sounds to me like the same accent, only modulated depending on the audience. We all tinker with our way of speaking according to context and company.

My accent is standard Lanarkshire council scheme but with the tell-tale hesitations of someone taught from an early age to suppress glottal stops and say ‘Yes’ instead of ‘Aye’. 

Many a working-class child was brought up this way, to ‘speak proper’, because that was how important and successful people spoke.

These days, I tune my accent up and down as needed.

I soften it when conversing with anyone from far-flung lands where the west of Scotland vernacular is an alien and unfathomable tongue. Foreign climes like Bearsden and Morningside.

By contrast, I harden my accent in situations where I sense danger afoot and want to sound like I can take care of myself. 

I start ayein’ and nawin’ and mashing my consonants when I’m in places teeming with unsavoury and untrustworthy characters — East End pubs, sheriff courts, the Scottish parliament.

Of course, linguistic etiquette has all changed now. Today, an aspirational working-class parent would do well to get their offspring to anti-elocution lessons, where they can be drilled on eliding their Ls, dropping their Gs, and generally sounding like an inhabitant of Craiglang.

Across politics, the arts, academia and publishing, there is a small army of the professionally aggrieved who are handsomely subsidised to speak Scots, which in most cases amounts to speaking English with a Glaswegian accent. It is a form of minstrelsy but it’s not bigotry or anything because these people have the right politics and prejudices.

Invariably, these are the progeny of Scotland’s ruling caste, the sorts of characters who say they went to school ‘on the south side’ to give the impression of having survived a gritty rundown comp when the truth is anything but.

While these phonies do tend to gravitate towards Broughty Ferry, the Hamptons of the SNP, or Portobello, where Green-voting critics of gentrification go to gentrify, the evidence in Lara Bird’s case is inconclusive. 

She might be changing her accent as a matter of political tactics or, as I suspect is more likely, she has one of those bifurcated accents common to London Scots. No grand plot, no dastardly conspiracy. It’s all just vocal chords.

Where I did take objection was the stroppy antics over swearing an oath to the King.

She prefaced the ceremony by clarifying that she was saying the words so she could serve her constituents and making it known that her loyalty was to the Scottish constitutional tradition of popular sovereignty.

Then, with crossed fingers and a petulant toss of her head this way and that, she got it over with. It was like watching a moody teenager bleat that forcing her to take the bins out was, like, well fascist.

The older I become the less patience I have for these kinds of shenanigans. When an MP causes a scene at their swearing in, they draw attention to themselves and not to their constituency. It sets a tone: this one is going to be a handful.

The notion that the Scots are sovereign is romantic mush. Scottish sovereignty of any kind was dissolved in 1707 and three centuries later sovereignty in the United Kingdom rests with the King-in-Parliament.

That remains the case despite the best efforts of the academics, the legal theorists, the commentators, and the activists.

Don’t believe me? Scotland just elected its fourth pro-independence Scottish parliament in a row. When should we expect the Union Jack to come down?

Ours is a constitutional monarchy, not a republican system. If you don’t approve of these arrangements, you are at liberty to say so, whether on the streets or in the Commons, but when it comes to an oath of office, such a pledge should always be made without reservation.

There is an argument that MPs who refuse to swear or affirm the oath should be denied both the right to sit in Parliament and the salary that comes with it.

Lara Bird is not a revolutionary. She is not standing up for an oppressed or occupied people. She is an MP for the Scottish establishment party, the party of the powerful and privileged, and she has the good fortune of having retained a seat for that party in a by-election.

All she had to do was turn up, swear the oath, and be grateful for where she was standing and the trust which her constituents had placed in her. If the idea of pledging her loyalty to the King was too much to bear, she should not have contested a public office that requires it.

Be a republican by all means, but don’t turn up on the first day of the job demanding that an exemption be made to suit your preferences. This isn’t about you.

Lara Bird could speak in Klingon for all I care. She was elected to serve the needs and interests of Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, not to cynically endear herself to the SNP rank and file by pretending to resist the Crown while taking its coin.

In that regard, she really is a phoney.