This one's for you, Jackie . It come from the UK-based Plain English Campaign's weekly mini-missive:

We've had several e-mails on the 'have vs has' debate (for collective nouns). As so often with linguistic arguments, Bill Bryson provides a common-sense approach in his excellent book Troublesome Words.

"Deciding whether to treat nouns of multitude (words like majority, flock, army, Government, group, crowd) as singulars or plurals is entirely a matter of the sense you intend to convey. Although some authorities have tried to fix rules, such undertakings are almost inevitably wasted effort. On the whole, Americans lean to the singular and Britons to the plural, often in ways that would strike the other as absurd (compare the American 'The couple was married in 1978' with the British 'England are to play Hungary in their first World Cup match.)"

Doesn't really solve any problems, but it *does serve to remind me I haven't read this Bryson offering yet.