I suppose Shakespeare doesn't come out too well with all his contractions - and he appears to have just made up a significant portion of his words rather than using 'standard' accepted words? Surely one of the main features of English grammar and usage is that it is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and if sufficient people accept a certain usage, eventually it can become the norm?

This is not a question of bad English but snobbery and a bad understanding of the English language. 'Innit' is a well established form of colloquial English, probably not yet appropriate for a formal document but quite OK in informal speech. The one to watch now is 'annit' a short form of the northwest midland dialect of English, also known as Cheshire, North Shropshire etc, of 'anner it' – in standard English 'hasn't it' which seems to be gaining a wider usage and may one day become standard.

There seems to me to be an underlying hypocrisy and snobbery on the part of the would be metropolitan chattering classes. Take for example the grammatically incorrect dropping of the definite article in names of countries which contain countable nouns or are plural, or were historically an adjective describing a specific place, by the BBC, and the metropolitan chattering classes, as part of a perverse politically correct pogrom. Even small children manage to internalise the standard usage. On television programmes you can see people wince as they drop the definite article in names containing countable nouns and plurals. Trying to impose the usage, as I have seen some presenters do on the BBC, on people being interviewed, is just bad manners as well as bad English.

Examples of what I am taking about are: 'United Kingdom' instead of 'The United Kingdom'. Kingdom is a countable noun which is made specific by being the united one, as opposed to any other kingdom, and as such needs the definite article 'the'. When we say England we don't need the definite article 'the' because it is an actual name and as such is a proper noun. So we say 'The Peoples' Republic of China', but we say 'China', because in the case of the peoples' republic – the republic is specifically the peoples'. 'The Netherlands' because it is plural and not 'Netherlands'. Other casualties in BBC politicospeak are 'Ivory Coast', 'Cameroons', 'Netherlands', 'United States', 'EU', etc. All for grammatically incorrect reasons. The use of the word 'the' has nothing to do with aggrandising some names rather than others or making them more important.

Lets live and let live in language without being unnecessarily rude to people. By all means teach some form of standard so people are not educationally disadvantaged and have a starting point to communicate with other people formally and informally. But like it or not English will remain flexible and evolve in its many variants.