MP Jess Phillips praises Brummie accent

A Birmingham MP's has said her accent has been her "greatest gift", after a survey found almost half of UK workers had been mocked for theirs.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today show, Yardley MP Jess Phillips hailed her Brummie accent and encouraged others to be proud of theirs.

She was joined by broadcaster Adrian Chiles, who hails from Quinton, who said his accent was an "advantage".

The survey forms part of the Accent Bias in Britain project.

The research was carried out by Professor Devyani Sharma from Queen Mary University London and funded by Sutton Trust.

An entrenched "hierarchy of accent" caused social anxiety throughout some people's lives, the report concluded.

"When I was a kid, my dad warned us we wouldn't be taken seriously because my vowel sounds were very Brummie," Ms Philips said.

"You still get this assumption that we go down the mines or I work in a car factory because of the way I sound."

She said one of her main roles as an MP was to communicate with regular people, adding that her accent meant they often felt she understood their situations.

Mr Chiles meanwhile urged people to "be yourself".

While acknowledging he might have subconsciously moderated his Brummie vowels over the years to make them more "acceptable", he said speaking "clearly" was far more important than people's accents.

"I have found it to my advantage in life... people always underestimated me. They hear a Brummie accent and they think you're thick," he said.

"People's expectations were always very low.

"It meant I had to do relatively little to impress them. I only had to string together three coherent sentences and people looked at me as if I was Stephen Hawking."