Mistake in financial times paper

Dear Gmatindianguy,

I'm happy to respond. These days, because of so much competition from free web news, even the best newspapers are between a rock and a hard place. As much as some purists there no doubt would like to maintain lofty standards, compromises toward more colloquial speech are inevitable, as such are necessarily to avoid alienating the less well-spoken consumers. Thus, most regrettably, we cannot expect impeccable GMAT SC quality from any newspapers or any form of writing that is attempting to be be profit-driven.

I would say there are not two independent clauses but two verbs in parallel with one subject. We certainly would not have a comma when the parallel verb phrases are short, but since an infinitive phrase is nested inside the first verb phrase, a comma is helpful for showing the larger organization of the sentence. The use of the comma is not 100% right nor 100% wrong, but acceptable.

With the pronoun, this is a very gray area that definitely would not be tested on the GMAT. Many things determine the antecedent of a pronoun: some are more grammatical, such as proximity and certainly agreement, but some are logical or even rhetorical. In some sense, the big rhetorical presence in the sentence is the nation of Britain: the subject of the sentence, the prime minister, for example, is "tall" only because he's standing on the shoulders of this giant. Because of this rhetorical weight given to the nation of Britain, we could argue that the pronoun is acceptable. Once again, this is much much further down the rabbit-hole of pronouns than the GMAT would ever go.

Does all this make sense?
Mike