'In all the history of the English language, there has never been such a powerful grass-roots organisation to influence it as the Plain English Campaign.' That is the opinion of Dr Tom McArthur, one of the UK's leading linguists.

Throughout history, changes to our language have always come from the top of our society and filtered down. But Plain English Campaign has changed all that. In what the author Dr Tony Gibson described as 'neighbourhood-based world shaking', Plain English Campaign has brought about a dramatic improvement in the way our government and many other types of organisations communicate with the people of our country.

Plain English Campaign's roots began back in 1971. George's mother, Chrissie Maher, had been campaigning for the professional newspapers to take up the plight of her local community in Liverpool but they were too concerned with the bigger issues of the day. To combat this she created the UK's first 'community' newspaper called 'The Tuebrook Bugle'. This was unheard of at the time because a great mystique still surrounded the production of newspapers. Together with other women from the local community, and the local vicar, Chrissie set about writing, editing and producing a newspaper that would deal with local issues. The success of this project led to the birth of many other community newspapers throughout the UK. One of the purposes of The Bugle was to help ordinary people understand the baffling information that our government was sending to them.

Before Chrissie started highlighting the problems created by unclear information, most of the information that the public received was written in a style which they had no chance of understanding.

By 1974 Chrissie realised that there was another big problem. The Bugle was able to help many literate adults but there were also millions of adults in our country who could hardly read and write at all. To help these people Chrissie created a newspaper called 'The Liverpool News'. This newspaper was deliberately designed and written in a way which was easy for people with poor literacy skills to read. Before the creation of this newspaper the only reading materials available to adults with reading difficulties were books aimed at children. The Liverpool News gave adults something they could read without them losing their dignity.