Mea Culpa: Clause and effect

Questions of language and style in last week’s Independent, by Susanna Richards

When our own headlines are in accidental doublespeak, we’re in trouble (Russian State Library)

“It is clear that Starmerism has so far been defined by the eradication of Corbynism, which has had damaging consequences at grassroots level,” one of our contributors wrote in an opinion piece last week.

For the grammar nerds among you, the second part of that sentence is an example of a non-restrictive relative clause – a thing unbeloved of editors everywhere for its propensity to cause utter confusion. If the political alignment of the author hadn’t been obvious from the rest of the article, it would have been hard to know what they meant: was it the eradication of Corbynism that had caused the damage, or the Corbynism itself?

I’m sure our more politically attuned readers will have taken a view on that, one way or the other.