The domain of politics has become a well-established area of enquiry for researching language, gender and professional communication in global political settings in recent years (e.g. Wilson and Boxer 2015; Mullany and Yoong 2016) . This chapter will focus on the party political setting of the United Kingdom's (UK's) House of Lords -the upper chamber of the UK Parliament based in Westminster, London. Its gendered name, the 'Lords', epitomises the notion that the role of a political leader is

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... dered 'male' (see Mullany and Schnurr this volume). Women have been permitted to participate in the Lords, to some extent, since 1958, but their participation still remains significantly lower than that of men, at just 28% (up from 24% in 2015). This is typical of women's participation across the globe -the latest Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) statistics show that only 25% of national parliamentarians are women (IPU 2020). This chapter adopts a case study approach (e.g. Cameron and Shaw 2016; Mullany and Yoong 2016) to explore professional communication in a political setting in which being male is institutionally positioned as the norm. It examines how politicians construct intersecting gender and national identities of Scottishness, Welshness and Englishness through the professional communication strategies they use, in their parliamentary discourse; this includes deliberately drawing attention to identity differences that draw on national categories and stereotypes and how these intersect with gender and social class identities. Such constructions take place against a backdrop of geopolitical change in the UK. Although the UK itself still exists as the 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland', with Great Britain comprising England, Scotland and Wales, since 1998, some powers that used to be held solely in Westminster have been 'devolved' to political institutions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which now have their own parliamentary institutions (as well as representation at Westminster). Nationalist political parties, which seek greater autonomy to break away from the UK and form separate