A national calamity was narrowly averted today when police arrested a secret group of Grammar Nazis in an underground classroom. A Scotland Yard spokesman said the sting operation successfully thwarted their plans to "raise British standards by removing all those who could not construct a proper sentence, and placing them in Gloucestershire concentration camps for extra lessons".
Head lecturer Führer Colin Mitchelton-Swannet and his entire Linguistics faculty staff have been arrested and charged with inciting the Fourth Reich. From custody, Führer Colin said: "We were only trying to create a superior race of Britons by weeding out all those idiots who can't even write a cheque. A people who uphold great British grammatical values. No more misplaced ellipses. Never again a comma where there should be a semi-colon. Every apostrophe in its right place."
Scotland Yard responded to a poorly-written anonymous tip-off, likely from a disgruntled ex-member of the group, which led them to a classroom bunker beneath Oxford University’s Trinity College. The Chief Superintendent issued this written statement: “We decided to raid at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, when students would be drowsy and off-guard. To our surprise we found them all standing to attention with a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, chanting verb conjugations by rote. Some of my men were quite shaken. The masters were arrested at the end of the lesson, and the students were immediately sent to detention, where there their they're copying lines of I shall not plot Nazi uprisings in class time."
Angry parents have accused Führer Colin of being a "linguistic fascist", to which he responded that it's merely a case of semantics.
Scotland Yard have issued an urgent warning that Grammar Nazis tend to coincide their annual door-knock appeal with International Apostrophe Day. If approached, residents are advised to hide all their possessives and avoid entering into a written contraction.
