Government is? Government are?

I got in trouble a while back (well was made to look like an idiot - which I am OK with I guess - it happens more and more it seems lately) for 'correcting' someone regarding this subject-verb agreement situation.

I had sort of accepted, against my grammatical intuition, that in the UK it is "Government are" and "Government have".

But then I read this from the BBC:

The government is to make big changes to the way it subsidises renewable energy, the BBC has learned.

My trusty Economist style guide is murky on this one. Thoughts? Advice? Rule of Law?

Collective nouns are a tricky business.  It's true that in the UK there's more of a tendency to treat them as plural than in the US, but according to the Oxford dictionary, British English treats them as either singular or plural. 

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/words/matching-verbs-to-collective-nouns-american

I usually tell my students that if they want to express the idea of a collection of individuals working together, they should use the plural and if they want to express the idea of a sort of monolithic entity, they should use the singular.  The Borg is, for example (nerdy Star Trek reference). 

The Borg is

That should be their motto.

Listen I never fully trusted Jean Luc after his assimilation. And it seems to me that whenever he was dressing down a crew member for poor performance the temptation would be great not to say something like, "Well yes, I messed up the level 2 diagnostic.....but in all fairness, I was never ASSIMILATED BY THE BORG!"