I, of course, was against the motion. Our side won easily and gained many more of the 'don't knows' than the other side. Our case was given great assistance by the data. According to a detailed study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies earlier this year, if you taxed the rich more, there is a good chance that you would reduce the proportion of tax revenue which they pay. It was pretty difficult for the pro-tax side to argue with that. Polly Toynbee chose to ignore the point entirely in her speech and then later said "It's just not true!" without supplying any evidence.

The background to the paradoxical fact that taxing the rich less, induces them to pay more money is the simple history of the past 30 years. In 1978/79 when the top tax rate was 83%, the richest one per cent of the population contributed 11% of the income tax paid. The top rate was then reduced to 60% in the following year. The investment income surcharge of 15% was abolished in 1984 and then the top tax rate was brought down to 40% in, if I remember rightly, 1988/89.

The innocent would have assumed that this would lead to a massive reducation in tax contributed by the rich. In fact, by 2001/02, the contribution of the richest had doubled - yes, doubled - to 22%. If you were to increase the tax rates on the rich, all the evidence suggests you would be in great danger or reversing this benign process.

Kelvin MacKenzie gave by far the most outrageous and amusing speech which made the evening entertaining as well as interesting.

ADDED LATER

In my speech I referred to a study published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. This suggested that the marginal rate at which the richest one per cent are taxed is currently 53% (this includes indirect taxes). It further suggested that the rate at which the treasury could extract the largest amount from these people was 56.6% or 40% or 49% depending on different ways of analysing the data. The paper commented on the latter two estimates, "...both these estimates imply that cuts in the Marginal Effective Tax Rate facing the richest 1% would actually increase revenues".

The paper can be accessed on the IFS website at http://www.ifs.org.uk/mirrleesreview/press_docs/rates.pdf .

The man who came to dominate Communist rule was, of course, Mao Zedong. He won the power struggles within the party and, as a by-product of his power-hunger and his communist views, an estimated 30 million people died of starvation. The agricultural communes he created were a catastrophe. People who had looked carefully after land and produce that was their own, failed to do so when the land was owned by large communes. Production fell. Starvation resulted. This crisis was made worse by Mao's idea that everyone should melt down their steel This took much time and energy, further damaging food production. Then there was the cultural revolution, one of several episodes of political terror.

Mao - communist zealot - was surely responsible for more deaths than any other person who ever lived. He should be regarded as one of the vilest men in history, in the same league as Hitler.

Mao's policies have been ditched. In the end, his political enemies, notably Deng Xiaoping, took over and abandoned his disastrous policies. But the extraordinary things is that Mao is still treated as a revered figure. I was astonished to see his complacent face beaming out from the the paper currency. The room where he was present at this first congress of the Chinese Communist Party is treated as a kind of shrine. It is a notable example of 'double-think'. Although we, in Britain, are not exempt from such double-thinking. For example, many people still regard the post-war Labour government led by Attlee as a great government. Yet it set about disastrus nationalisations which have since been undone. But this is a more minor episode and the Attlee government was full of men shining with honour compared to Mao.

There may be an attempt - certainly among some of the people described in the brilliant 'Wild Swans' which I am currently reading - to argue: "Yes, Mao made mistakes. But he created order and drove out the foreigners. For these things he should be admired."

These, I suspect, are very bad reasons to revere the man. Plenty of countries got rid of foreign colonialists through the 20th century. The list would be too long to write down here but it would obviously include South Africa, Malaysia and India, to name just a few. It was possible to get rid of foreign colonialists without mass terror and starvation. In fact China itself is now the disreputable colonialist in its continued control of Tibet.

The fact that, in the end, Mao lost the battle of ideas is very obvious when you visit the room in which he had that celebrated meeting. When you emerge, you find yourself in a district called Xintiandi. It is the smartest shopping district in Shanghai. Close by this shrine to communism are many shops and restaurants owned by capitalist and, often, foreign enterprises including Starbucks, Shanghai Tang (wonderful clothes, handbags and so on), Paul's (the French patisserie chain) and a branch of Chopard (the Swiss jeweller).

I wonder when, if ever, the Chinese will stop treating Mao as a hero and treat him as the villain he really was?

What a perversion this is of the welfare state. How horrified would be Attlee and Beveridge and others who had the dream of excellent healthcare provision for all.

The psychology of the NHS decision to abandon those who are so insulting as to pay for some better drugs is a fascinating subject. I guess the reason the NHS feels so bitter towards those who pay for better drugs is the implication that the drugs supplied by the NHS are not good enough. This, of course, is true. But the NHS cannot bear the truth to be pointed out or to accept it. So it wishes to punish those who assert it. This is the psychology, perhaps, not of the jealous lover but the spoilt, vain, self-centred child who cares nothing for the actual well-being of others.

The actions of the NHS are immoral and I hope they will prove to be illegal, too.

Here is the beginning of the story in today's Sunday Times:

A woman dying of cancer was denied free National Health Service treatment in her final months because she had paid privately for a drug to try to prolong her life.

Linda O’Boyle was told that as she had paid for private treatment she was banned from free NHS care.

She is believed to have been the first patient to die after fighting for the right to top up NHS treatment with a privately purchased cancer medicine that the health service refused to provide.

News of her death at the age of 64 has emerged as six other patients launch a legal action to trigger a test case that they hope would force the NHS to allow them to top up their care with private drugs.

The full story is here.

There is an argument for reducing the number of beds. Part of it is that doctors now believe that the long times in hospital that used to take place - after childbirth for example - were unnecessary and even undesirable for the patient. However it is hard to doubt that the massive drop in bed numbers that has taken place since the creation of the NHS goes beyond what would be suggested by improved medical treatment and revised theory on how long one should stay in bed.

Hospitals ought not to be working near to capacity. They ought to have spare capacity so that new arrivals can be admitted quickly and can be treated promptly. For many years, the NHS has been working too close to capacity. What is dismaying is that despite all the extra money spent by the Labour government since 1997 that this is still the case. The system is not working. The NHS does not just lack money. It is a bad system that causes suffering and unnecessary deaths despite the sometimes heroic devotion of those in the front line.

The full article on Labour's bed closures is here.

The first is that the widespread idea that fascism - including Hitler and Mussolini - is of the Right is totally incorrect. Of course you can get into long and unrewarding arguments about definitions. But this matters because those of us who are genuinely of the Right are tainted by any kind of an association with fascism. Any such taint is unfair and unwarranted. I cannot help thinking that the slur is, consciously or unconsciously, encouraged by those media people and teachers who very often are of the Left.

The core of what it means to be Right is surely a belief in free markets. You might add in 'freedom of the individual' but not all would agree.

The essence of what it is to be of the Left is a belief in government intervention, control and ownership.

The party of which Hitler was the leader was the National Socialist Party. The word "Socialist" was not a misprint. This was openly and avowedly a Left-wing party. Goldberg includes an entire translation of the 1920 Party Programme which was co-written by Hitler himself. It includes the following points (which I admit are not wholly clear to me but which certainly include plenty of government control and ownership):

"11. Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of rent-slavery.
12. ...the total confiscation of all war profits.
13. We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
14. We demand a division of profits [profit sharing] of heavy industries.
15. We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare...
17 We demand ...provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purpose of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and prevention of all speculation in land."

Goldberg suggests that the reason we in Britain began to think of the Nazis as very different from socialists was propaganda by Stalin. Stalin called anyone who disagreed with his line a fascist. He even called Trotsky a fascist. We came to be believe that those who were enemies of Stalin could not be socialist since Stalin was a socialist. But this this was a false conclusion. Socialists are quite capable of falling out among themselves. One big theoretical difference betweeen Stalin and Hitler is shown by the name of Hitler's party. He believed in "National" socialism. Stalin believed in "international" socialism.

The truth is, says Goldberg, that Hitler did not care that much about economics anyway. He was mainly concerned with German 'identity politics'. But the point remains that it is not correct to suggest that Hitler was of the Right. He was not.

The Nazis borrowed whole sections from the communist playbook. Party members - male and femals - were referred to as comrades. Hitler recalls how his appeals to "class-conscious proletarians" who wanted to strike out against the "monarchist, reactionary agitation with the fists of the proletariat" were successful in drawing countless communists to their meetings....In short, the battle between the Nazis and the communists was a case of two dogs fighting for the same bone.

I cannot say that Goldberg offers an abolutely knock-down case for his argument. He says almost nothing about what the Nazis did in government as opposed to what they argued prior to reaching power. However the book provides quite a lot of evidence of the latter.

The second point that Goldberg makes is that our modern, so-called "liberal" governments behave in a way that is recognisably fascist in the sense that he defines the term. I won't go into his full justification here. I will only mention that he bases his idea of what fascism truly means on Mussolini. He seems, basically, to liken 'real' fascism with totalitarianism. It is indeed not difficult - or new - to accept the idea that modern so-called 'liberal' democracies increasingly seek to determine every aspect of the way we live. In that sense, we increasingly live in totalitarian states.

The state is now entering areas which would have been unthinkable in the 19th century: whether or not children are smacked by their parents, whether or where we smoke cigarettes, whether we wear seat-belts or not, what is printed on food labels, what prices water companies charge, what childen are taught in schools, what we put into rubbish bins and even the exact time at which we put out our rubbish. Many of these will seem to many people to be perfectly reasonable controls on our behaviour. But the word 'liberal' does not seem appropriate. The word 'totalitarian' increasingly does.

Jonah Goldberg makes many controversial points and I am not convinced by them all. But the book is certainly worth a look.

Jonah Goldberg "Liberal Fascism" published by Doubleday (£18.99).

It appears that the British Crime Survey has a very particular way of counting crimes. The real incidence of all violent crime appears to be 83 per cent higher than that which given in the British Crime Survey. This understating of crime has been going on since the survey started in 1981. Since the total level of crime in each year since then has been understated but to an unknown but presumably varying degree each year, the assertion that violent crime is going down is not wholly reliable. I suspect there are further reasons to doubt the trustworthiness of the crime figures. A few have already been suggested in comments on my previous post (below).

I should add that the academics who wrote this report went out of their way not to criticise the statisticians themselves. The fault they find is with a way of treating the figures that was started in 1981.

Here is part of the Civitas press release:

...ever since its inception in 1981, the British Crime Survey (BCS) has omitted many crimes committed against people who have been repeat victims. If people are victimised in the same way by the same perpetrators more than five times in a year, the number of crimes is put down as five. The justification for this was ‘to avoid extreme cases distorting the rates’, but, as Farrell and Pease point out, ‘if the people who say they suffered ten incidents really did, it is capping the series at five that distorts the rate’.

By recalculating the figures without the arbitrary cap of five crimes, Farrell and Pease have revealed that there are over three million crimes omitted from the BCS:

In its most recent published sweep, BCS estimated an annual total of some 6.8 million ‘household’ crimes (covering burglary; theft in a dwelling; other household theft; thefts of and from vehicles; bicycle theft; and vandalism to household property and vehicles). It estimated some 4.1 million ‘personal’ crimes (which covers assault, sexual offences, robbery, theft from the person, and other personal theft). Our re-analysis reveals that, if we believe what the respondents tell us, there would be 7.8 million household offences and 6.3 million personal crimes. Thus, removing the arbitrary five offence limit, over three million extra offences come to light… Household crime is increased by 15% and personal crime by a staggering 52%. As the sum of personal and household crimes, total crime would have been understated by 29%.

The increase in the number of crimes is not evenly spread across all types of crime. For example, theft of vehicles is not increased at all, but levels of vandalism are almost a quarter more than reported, and there are 20 per cent more burglaries. Violent crime of all types increases by 83 per cent. Violence perpetrated by an acquaintance increases by 156 per cent and domestic violence by 140 per cent. As Farrell and Pease say, ‘these are not minor differences’.

The full press release is here.

Hospital waiting lists are a prime example. Much unemployment is hidden under the category of incapacity benefit. Education is an outstanding example. My confidence in all government statistics has been completely undermined.

When I was a once-a-week leader writer for the Daily Telegraph (about five years ago) I would often start my research with some headline government statistics that appeared to support the official line and then find, on looking more deeply at the figures, that the headline figures were extremely misleading and, in some cases, that the real story was the very opposite of what the government was suggesting. Exam results are a well-known - or rather 'notorious' - example of this but there are many others that are less well-known and which succeed in fooling people (or at least the media).

As I explained to the irate civil servant, I am not suggesting that that figures are simply changed by the statisticians - that numbers are moved around Mugabe-style. No, I am suggesting something more subtle. I am also not suggesting that the statisticians are driving the misleading of the public. That is a political matter and therefore surely driven by the politicians and their 'special advisers' and public relations advisers - although let us not pretend that statisticians are all without political views and that all of them can put those views away when they select which, of the many ways of measuring things, they choose.

It is quite easy to manipulate statistics. One can choose the numbers that put the best gloss on things, ignoring ones which tell a different story. One can quote one study which ignoring others. One can redefine what counts and does not count as an instance, say, of an exam pass (just change the pass mark from 50% to 10% and you get a surge of apparent academic success.

One of the statistics I am currently suspicious of is the supposed fall in violent crime. I have not had time to mine the statistics. But I noticed this weekend a story in the Sunday Telegraph which encouraged my suspicion. A professor of 'advanced social sciences' surveyed frontline police officers, contacting them by email. No such study can be regarded as conclusive. However she apparently contacted 1200 of these officers which is quite a big sample.

She

...found that 80 per cent of borough police officers agreed or strongly agreed that knife crime was worse in their community than five years ago. Only eight per cent disagreed.

Some 70 per cent judged that gun crime had worsened and nearly three quarters said they had seen a rise in gang crime.

Professor Qvortrup herself remarked that the result of her survey 'flies in the face of other research from the Home Office and the British Crime Survey, which says that gun crime is falling'.

I wonder. Is gun crime really falling? If so, why?

The full story is here.

Professor Mike Richards, the national cancer director, has said that in 2004, Britain spent £76 per head on cancer drugs compared with £143 in Germany and £121 in France. Even after adding in private spending on cancer drugs in Britain, our figure still fell well short of the others at £90 a head.

This spending on cancer drugs - particularly new and therefore expensive cancer drugs - is a forward indication of what the survival rates will be (so I am told by Professor Sikora, the leading cancer specialist). So we may be confident that when the figures finally emerge for cancer survival rates for the past few years, Britain will again be among the worst performers. Or, to put it quite clearly, thousands of people will continue to die of cancer in this country because we have the NHS instead of one of the other systems in the advanced world.

The story from the Daily Mail is here.

The situation with prostate cancer is more complex. But there is reason to suspect, at the very least, that the USA has dramatically lowered its deaths from prostate cancer because of active screening. A friend of mine in the USA is screened as a matter of routine for prostate cancer and colon cancer. Prostate cancer is apparently the second biggest killer of men in Britain. The screening test for it is far from ideal. The British medical profession tends to be sceptical of it to the point of hardly using it at all unless the patient pushes hard for it. I suspect that this is one of many instances where the medical opinion of the British has been influenced by the rationing mentality of the NHS. It is true that the American may over-test and over-prescribe but British medicine certainly has the opposite, more serious defect. In any case, in America, where they screen for prostate cancer, the death rates have come down more dramatically than in Britain. Or, to put it clearly again, many men die of prostate cancer each year in Britain because we have the NHS. The news story is here.

In a single week there was yet one more story about how the NHS has failed to perform as intended. Figures from the NHS Information Centre, apparently, show that nearly half the population has not seen an NHS dentist in the past two years. Story here.

It is possible that regular publicity about the bad record of Britain in treating cancer compared to other advanced countries will, eventually, prompt the government to spend more money on cancer drugs. That could be regarded as a 'good thing'. However, given the huge amount of money wasted in the NHS on excess back-up staff, poor use of staff and under-used equipment, it only means that money will be taken away from other service to patients that are less easily measured - care for the elderly for example. So even if the government moved to spend more on cancer drugs, it could well mean no net improvement in the amount of unnecessary suffering British people accept because we have the NHS rather than the medical care of other advanced countries.

I have considered the modern idea of language-learning - particularly the idea of learning phrases - to be absurd and obviously misguided. It was, I thought, clearly a bad idea not to learn the meaning of individual words. I still hold to that view.

However there is a different, modern way of learning which I have stumbled across which seems to me an improvement on both (though it surely needs to be backed up by some of the old-fashioned methods).

I tried a CD course by Michel Thomas. I bought it with the idea of helping my 10 year-old daughter to learn Italian. There is a dearth of Italian language textbooks for children. She, I must admit, is not as excited by the CDs as I am. On the other hand, I think they are helping her a great deal. (My teaching of both Italian and French to her has, I confess, not been as successful as I had hoped.)

Michel Thomas' approach is clever in a number of ways, not all of which can I easily describe.

You are always learning something new yet also using something you have already learned. This gives you an encouraging sense of gaining knowledge and being able to say something new in a foreign language. But at the same time, since you are repeating something you already know, you are also sub-consciously re-inforcing your memory of that.

You thus are motivated to keep going and you are memorising without any conscious effort. You are also learning to speak the language from the very start.

I recommend the course certainly to adults and older children and probably for children down to the age of 10. And I am copying Michel Thomas's technique for my own teaching of French to my daughter.

I have considered the modern idea of language-learning - particularly the idea of learning phrases - to be absurd and obviously misguided. It was, I thought, clearly a bad idea not to learn the meaning of individual words. I still hold to that view.

However there is a different, modern way of learning which I have stumbled across which seems to me an improvement on both (though it surely needs to be backed up by some of the old-fashioned methods).

I tried a CD course by Michel Thomas. I bought it with the idea of helping my 10 year-old daughter to learn Italian. There is a dearth of Italian language textbooks for children. She, I must admit, is not as excited by the CDs as I am. On the other hand, I think they are helping her a great deal. (My teaching of both Italian and French to her has, I confess, not been as successful as I had hoped.)

Michel Thomas' approach is clever in a number of ways, not all of which can I easily describe.

You are always learning something new yet also using something you have already learned. This gives you an encouraging sense of gaining knowledge and being able to say something new in a foreign language. But at the same time, since you are repeating something you already know, you are also sub-consciously re-inforcing your memory of that.

You thus are motivated to keep going and you are memorising without any conscious effort. You are also learning to speak the language from the very start.

I recommend the course certainly to adults and older children and probably for children down to the age of 10. And I am copying Michel Thomas's technique for my own teaching of French to my daughter.

I have considered the modern idea of language-learning - particularly the idea of learning phrases - to be absurd and obviously misguided. It was, I thought, clearly a bad idea not to learn the meaning of individual words. I still hold to that view.

However there is a different, modern way of learning which I have stumbled across which seems to me an improvement on both (though it surely needs to be backed up by some of the old-fashioned methods).

I tried a CD course by Michel Thomas. I bought it with the idea of helping my 10 year-old daughter to learn Italian. There is a dearth of Italian language textbooks for children. She, I must admit, is not as excited by the CDs as I am. On the other hand, I think they are helping her a great deal. (My teaching of both Italian and French to her has, I confess, not been as successful as I had hoped.)

Michel Thomas' approach is clever in a number of ways, not all of which can I easily describe.

You are always learning something new yet also using something you have already learned. This gives you an encouraging sense of gaining knowledge and being able to say something new in a foreign language. But at the same time, since you are repeating something you already know, you are also sub-consciously re-inforcing your memory of that.

You thus are motivated to keep going and you are memorising without any conscious effort. You are also learning to speak the language from the very start.

I recommend the course certainly to adults and older children and probably for children down to the age of 10. And I am copying Michel Thomas's technique for my own teaching of French to my daughter.

Lord Tebbit, one of the speakers, said that when he did National Service after the war, this was a time when the literacy of every young man was tested. He said that 95% of the young men called for National Service were found to be literate - and that despite the enormous dislocation to education that resulted from the war. This compares with some 20% of the present population who are now said by the government to be "functionally illiterate".

He was using this statistic to support his argument that the reduction of selection since the war had damaged state education. I would be glad to obtain chapter and verse on this. If the figure stands up well, it is very important since it indicates more clearly than any other fact one is likely to discover that the quality of state education has been on a declining path.

In this case it would fit in with my main contention on education, that state education has been a disaster for Britain and has deteriorated more the longer it has gone on. In the 1940s, there were plenty of genuinely independent church secondary schools and many primary schools had not been in the hands of governnent for very long.

Lord Tebbit went on to suggest that all state schools should be denationalised and handed over, I think he said, to charitable trusts. Most of the vast bureaucratic superstructure of local authority and central government would be removed. There would be vouchers which would be worth more for those children with difficulties. This, he suggested, would transform our low standards of education as schools competed for custom and parents could genuinely make choices.

The motion was clearly carried. Before the debate, there were 339 votes for, 200 against and 152 abstentions. After the debate, there were 451 for, 202 against and 48 abstentions.

For myself, I regard the argument over selection and, in particular, grammar schools as a distraction from the most important point about education: that nationalisation of education has been a disaster and should be reversed.

Here is a doctor who works in accident and emergency writing about the manipulation of waiting times:

But what about the 98 per cent success rate for meeting the four-hour target?

From the patient's point of view it sounds marvellous - it means you have a 98 per cent chance of being seen and sorted from arrival in A&E.

Right? Wrong. You haven't had a Department of Health maths lesson.

Say you come in to hospital complaining of abdominal pain. You wait three hours to see a doctor -they organise a scan and blood tests and transfer you to a ward next to A&E.

The results come back two hours later and you can be discharged. In the real world, three plus two is five - that's five hours you've been waiting.

But in fact, because you were transferred to the A&E ward before four hours, officially you weren't actually in A&E all that time.

Confused? Me too - and I spend my working life in A&E!

It is even worse if you are a patient referred by your GP for emergency treatment. You bypass A&E and go straight to a ward.

As there are no targets for patients who bypass A&E, you may wait four hours before even being seen by a doctor, but this is not even recorded in the official figures as you went to an emergency ward and not the accident and emergency department.

If you are starting to understand the logic, a job in NHS management awaits you.

As well as the rules being "bent", the fact is the figures are often "fiddled".

This is done in numerous ways, from simply changing the discharge time - it is amazing how many patients are discharged at three hours 59 minutes - to delaying when ambulances are allowed to hand over patients to the hospital.

The most cynical way the figures are massaged is when patients are "moved" on the computer when in reality they are not physically moved at all, but perhaps go from a trolley to a bed, have a curtain drawn round them and the light turned off.

You don't have to be a brain surgeon to know this shouldn't happen, but it does, because A&E staff are concerned that if they have too many breaches, then they will face the Spanish Inquisition from management the next day.

But the saddest thing for me as a doctor, and you as a patient, is that I often have to see people not according to the urgency of their need but simply to satisfy a government target.

I remember having to treat a bloke who had called an ambulance for an ingrowing toenail and wanted to sort it out there and then as he was "off to Ibiza that evening".

Because his four-hour target was nearly up, he was seen before a patient in severe pain with a dislocated shoulder.

So Government claims that everything is lovely-jubbly are inaccurate.

In my experience, the real picture is that between 5 and 10 per cent of patients end up waiting longer than the four-hour target.

At peak times that can rise to 15 per cent - that's a million patients nationwide. And it will probably only get worse.

There has been a year-on-year rise in A&E attendances; many factors have contributed to this - an expanding population (in number and waist size), more alcohol and drug-related attendance, lower-quality GP out-of-hours services, and an increasingly elderly and frail population.

However, there has not been a corresponding increase in resources.

In A&E there are not enough nurses treating patients and there is a lack of senior A&E doctors to make treatment decisions.

When we do decide to admit a patient, there are not enough beds on acute wards, so patients have to wait unnecessarily in A&E.

Why is it that France and Germany have double the number of acute hospital beds that we do in the UK?

The doctor is Dr Nick Edwards. The full article in the Daily Mail is here. He has also written a book, IN STITCHES: The Highs And Lows Of Life As An A&E doctor.

Here is a link to the original interview.

Here is the BBC coverage of the story.

Here is the Times coverage.

I would like to add a link to coverage of the story by the Guardian but unfortunately I cannot find any. The BBC and the Times thought it was a big enough story to cover. David Freud is, after all, a government adviser and he was saying something pretty radical (though of course it was in The Welfare State We're In). Did the

Guardian

Here is a part of the interview:

This is the use of a verb in the plural with a singular noun. The sentence should read: "Chelsea falls behind in title race". There is only one Chelsea. The fact that it is a collective noun is irrelevant. It is still singular as any grammar book will confirm.

The use of plural verbs with singular nouns can - and is - defended as being one of those developments of the English language which naturally takes place over the years. Yes, indeed it is. Not many years ago, the Daily Express, of all papers still held out against it. But now I believe it has given way. Or, "Now they have given way" as many people would write these days.

But my view is that this is not simply a development of the English language that is arbitrary and means nothing. It is a change which reflects the failure of schools in Britain to teach much grammar for the past thirty years or so. That is why the change has taken place. It is a result of the inferior education which millions of people have experienced in recent decades. It is also an example of the way in which culture can travel from the least educated upwards as well as from the most educated down.

I am sure that all the top people in the BBC are well enough educated to know that it is bad grammar to write, "Charlton Athletic have announced that they have called off takeover talks with potential investors." (Link here.) But presumably they sanctioned the change. They felt that this was now common usage and that they should follow it, even though it was wrong. Thus has our written culture been formed by the least literate. Does any heroic newspaper still hold out against bad grammar?

I thought I might check out the Times of India. Yes, it has this sentence in the current online edition: "Arsenal has kicked ahead in the Premier League title race". Ah! Marvellous. A verb in the singular. What a relief. (Link here.) But unfortunately the headline for the same story is, "Arsenal make big move in Premier League title race." So the Times of India is not wholly holding the line against the poor grammar taking over the former 'mother country'.

How about The Times here in London. Does it cling to correct grammar? No. From today's online edition: "Arsenal have thrived while Chelsea are running run out of steam in the absence of Drogba". (Link here.)Dear, oh dear. It is a long way from the days when the advertisement used to read, "Top people take The Times".

I know that I have probably made a number of grammatical errors in writing this post. I know, too, that whenever someone writes about grammar, there is nothing more pleasurable than pointing out his or her grammatical failings. I have prepared myself to suffer such blows. It will be worth it for the pleasure of writing, as I have long wanted to, about this change - no, this deterioration - in the writing of English.