Mark Gallagher wrote:
I may be confused here, but I was under the impression we were discussing being sued _in a UK court_, not _by the UK government_. Very different things; HMG really doesn't give a damn about us and is very unlikely to unless we do something insanely stupid like publish Vanguard patrol details.
You forget, Anthony's American. Americans don't realise that the UK (or, indeed, any Western country) is a democracy with separation of powers and everything.
No, we simply own dictionaries (including your very own OED!) which properly point out that the word "government" has multiple meanings. One of them is, in Parliamentary systems, a collective term for the current ruling coalition and their attendant services, agencies, and whatnot, as in "the government lost a vote of no confidence". Another one is, much more generally, a collective term for the apparatus of the state, as in "Myanmar has an authoritarian government", or "the UK's system of government is constitutional monarchy".
-Mark