When we speak English is it fair to say that some accents are better (or better in certain contexts) than others? I remember when Clive James talked to me on radio about his success in Britain. He said the British judge people by their class accent and being Australian really threw them  – because they couldn’t work out how to classify the Australian voice. In years gone by, the BBC was the home of voices that spoke in a ‘BBC accent’ – or Standard Southern English (also called ‘RP’ meaning Received Pronunciation). This is sometimes called an ‘Oxbridge’ accent. Some time ago the BBC decided its voices needed to represent all of the British Isles and so hired broadcasters with regional accents from all over the UK. But this (we are told) has now gone so far the BBC rejects anyone who speaks RP on the grounds that they ‘sound too posh’. (I remember when I joined NewsRadio at the ABC, Philip Adams told me I had ‘poshed it up no end!’) Veteran BBC broadcaster Edward Stoughton has called for a truce in what has been dubbed the ‘accent wars’ at the broadcaster saying that ‘clarity should not be confused with class’. Stourton, who co-hosts World at One on BBC Radio 4, wrote in the Radio Times, ‘clarity and authority’ are important and ‘it’s easy to confuse those qualities with poshness; easy but wrong’. He added: ‘The novelist J. B. Priestley is a fine example of someone who possessed clarity and authority in spades without being remotely posh.’ Mr Stourton admitted that his accent was once, ‘way posher than the late Queen’s,’ but said the most important factor was being clear. What about accents here in Australia? When I first joined the ABC (many, many years ago) we were told at our induction session there are three Australian accents: Broad Australian, Middle Australian, and Educated Australian. And it was assumed that the population divided up roughly equally between them. Today my impression is that ‘Middle Australian’ has spread out and is spoken by the vast majority of us, with only small (and shrinking) portions of the population speaking either Broad Australian or Educated Australian. And I agree with Ed Stoughton that accent matters more in radio and television than it does in many other areas of life. He is also correct to say that what really matters is ‘clarity and authority’.