Mind your language
‘The government are entitled to pry into our bedrooms’ — there is nothing wrong with that. ‘The government is entitled to pry into our bedrooms’ there is nothing wrong with that either. In British English (as opposed to American English) collective nouns may take either a singular or a plural verb. Americans prefer singularity.
In a publication like The Spectator, conventions have to be adopted to keep the herbaceous borders of language neat. It is house style to use a singular verb with collective nouns such as government, BBC, nation.
If in British English it is normal to regard a company as plural (‘British Leyland are defunct’), that convention extends in colloquial usage to the word denoting its line of business. So we say, ‘The bank are complaining about my overdraft.’ Even in formal usage, fixed forms are demanded by familiarity. ‘An army marches on its stomach,’ Napoleon said, or so we are led to believe. (Something like it is apparently to be found in the memoir that the Comte de Las Cases wrote on St Helena.) One could hardly say, ‘An army march on their stomachs.’ England, though a single entity politically and geographically, suddenly becomes plural when it takes to the cricket field: ‘England were all out.’ Contrariwise, the United States, for all its formal lexical plurality, takes a singular verb geopolitically. So does the United Nations. The House of Lords is never plural, and that is not merely because ‘house’ is a singular, for the Commons follows suit in requiring a singular verb.
The beasts of the field, especially if they are to be shot, remain plural even though their grammatical form is singular. ‘Duck are threatened with avian influenza, partridge are not affected.’ Fish is so ordinarily the plural form that fishes sounds archaic.
One circumstance in which grammatical virtue may topple over into absurdity is ‘attraction’. Attraction is the ignis fatuus which tempts your verb into the wrong number, as with, ‘The colour of his later canvasses were duller.’ Perhaps you think such errors are unlikely, but Shakespeare made them, or at least Cassius did in Julius Caesar when he said, ‘The posture of your blows are yet unknown.’ In resisting false attraction, I can see the sense of saying, ‘A fleet of ships was sailing’ or even, ‘A handful of currants was left’. But to say, ‘A couple of them makes me laugh,’ or ‘A number of them is unwelcome,’ seems to me madness.
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