Eric Partridge ("You Have a Point There") disagrees. Single or double, quotation marks are inaccurate if the words are not strictly quoting.
Before the age of widespread international computer-mediated communication, authorities generally agreed on a rule of starting with one and alternating to the other for quotations within quotations. Many agreeing that starting with single quotation marks was the U.K. rule and starting with double quotation marks was the U.S. rule; with the U.K. switching to double quotation marks for quotations within quotations and the U.S. switching to single.
One U.K. authority that I have from 1985 describes U.K. use of double quotation marks in primary position as "fighting a rearguard action" in the U.K., with only The Times sticking to it. Everyone else used single quotation marks primarily, back then.
However, the influence of CMC has put a lot of pressure on the then U.K. habit. Today, after decades of Usenet, Fidonet, the World Wide Web, et al., the top articles on BBC News (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66007017) and The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/24/wagner-troops-...) use double quotation marks, and the pendulum has very much swung the other way, with the U.K. norm of the 1970s now being the rare exception.
However, the rule of switching for quotations within quotations still holds, and headlines quite often still use single quotation marks, even though article bodies will use double ones for the same quotation. This latter is observably the case on the BBC News and Guardian sites right now, to use the same examples.
You're absolutely right about British newspapers using double quotes nowadays, but British books still use single quotes, as far as I can tell.
An interesting question to ask, and a harder one to answer is: what kind of quotation marks did people use in handwriting at different points in history? I'm not totally sure about this, but I think there's a long tradition of people in Britain using double quotation marks in hardwriting, in particular, for school. So I suspect that there is a long tradition of the choice of quotation mark being context-dependent. So using single marks in books but double marks in newspapers isn't as strange as it might seem.
> Double quotation marks aren’t Australian Government style. Use them only for quotations within quotations.
My partner is a(n Australian) copy writer. She’s converted me to the following rule:
- If it’s a direct quote — some human uttered the words — it goes in “double quotes”.
- Any other thing that is quote-like, but not words that an individual human actually said, goes in ‘single quotes’.