You Spell Tomato, I Spell Tomatoe

It almost took off in America and the Australians almost have a basic grasp of it but the English language has always been a movable feast and has been evolving ever since the first person on our little island off the coast of mainland Europe looked at the letters of an alphabet and decided what order they would go in for the name of things over here.
It has been called the hardest language to learn for non-English speakers due to the nuances of the language which allows sentences like 'High Karen, eye wood like two start bye saying that eye am knot shore ewe red my male..' to be completely wrong but still completely readable as is Aonethr qiruk taht as lnog as the fsirt and lsat lterets are in pacle, the snetecne is still readable although your spell check may explode.
Outside of official documents or projects where perfect English is required, I have never been much of a spelling nazi, to me what someone is trying to say is always more important than how they say it which is a view that may be frowned upon by English Language Teachers but then English Language Teachers are a bit pompous about that sort of thing anyway.
The Education Secretary has been bemoaning the drop in English spelling standards and is blaming mobile phones and computers and i find myself in the strange position of agreeing with a Conservative Minister because during my 17 years in Education, i noticed that as bright as some of the students were, their spelling often sucked.
Quite why Americans, Gawd bless 'em, decided to mangle the English language and drop vowels (vowels for crying out loud) and stick the letter Z in words where the letter S was perfectly acceptable i can't explain but as for the the poor spelling i pin the blame squarely on spellcheck which either automatically corrects the wrong word or just underlines it with a red squiggle which a swift click rectifies for the sender.
Possibly we are seeing evolution of the English language in action, there are already a few words where alternative spelling are acceptable such as acknowledgment/acknowledgement, ambience/ambiance and counselor/counsellor and over the last few centuries the spelling of musick to become music, rime into rhyme and phantasy to fantasy shows how we spell is an ever evolving process.
In a perfect world British kids should just learn the correct spelling rather than adapt the language around there shaky grasp of spelling but as my friend explained that wearing hats probably sped up his baldness, all the time he wears a hat nobody will know he is bald, it's the same concept with spellcheck because as it is now omnipresent, nobody will know your spelling sucks!