Compensation Culture Spreads Across Atlantic

[Timber Loftis]

And we are all worse for it.
_________________________________
July 13, 2004
Britain's Stiff Upper Lip Is Being Twisted Into a Snarl
By SARAH LYALL

LONDON, July 12 - Once Britons wore their stoicism on their sleeves, acting almost as if they would rather die than complain. "For my own sake I do not regret this journey," the great failed explorer Capt. Robert Falcon Scott wrote in the journal found beside his frozen corpse in Antarctica in 1912, "which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past."

But there is a growing sense that the famous British habit of stoutly taking it on the chin is going the way of the farthing, the gentleman in the bowler hat and the empire. Just as in the United States, whose citizens have never been shy about sticking up for themselves, complaining is becoming a way of life in Britain.

"There seems to be a general acceptance that there is something going on in society which is really eating away at personal responsibility," said David Hooker, director of claims at Norwich Union, one of Britain's largest insurers. "It seems now that anything that happens to you in your life, someone else has got to take the blame."

That is certainly the case in Manchester, Britain's third-largest city, which last year spent £2.5 million, or $4.6 million, defending itself against American-style personal-injury lawsuits.

"The philosophy used to be that you would take things in your own hands and deal with them in your own way," said Paul Murphy, a member of the City Council. "You'd stand in the queue - that was the British way." Now, he said, would-be litigants take photographs of sidewalks undergoing repairs and then make trip-and-fall claims against the city - nearly 90 percent of which end up being dismissed as spurious.

Much of the new "compensation culture," as it is disparagingly called in the populist tabloids, has to do with the introduction, in 2000, of a "no win, no fee" payment structure, similar to that in the United States, in personal-injury cases. But the change is also in attitudes.

Britons used to revere stiff-upper-lip figures like Lord Uxbridge, who, hit by a cannonball at Waterloo, is said to have remarked to the Duke of Wellington, "By God, sir, I've lost my leg" - and then, it was said, buried it with full military honors. Now, the new heroes are moody celebrities like the soccer star David Beckham.

Rather than suffer in silence when he was hit above the eye by a soccer shoe in a locker-room fracas in 2003, he pulled his hair back in a girly hair band and flaunted his wound. More recently, he blamed Real Madrid, the team that pays him a reported 5.5 million euros a year, for his poor performance in the European Cup soccer tournament, saying it failed to train him properly.

"The sense of externalizing responsibility is very powerful, and it's being encouraged in a lot of ways," said Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent and a specialist in litigation in British society. He said his university was being sued by a student who, having been caught plagiarizing, contended that he had been doing so for three years and that his teachers were at fault for failing to catch him sooner.

"There's a continuous incitement to go down this particular road," Mr. Furedi said. "If you don't blame someone else, they think you're bizarre."

Mr. Furedi says the new attitude dates from the 1980's, when Margaret Thatcher, then the prime minister, tried to wean the country from the welfare state by privatizing government services, introducing consumers' charters and promoting the idea of Britons as clients rather than as citizens.

"At the same time, it became more fashionable to achieve in the courts what you couldn't do in politics," Mr. Furedi said. "We've pretty much achieved in 20 years what took the United States 50 years."

The result is a society where people are more likely to ask, "What can you do for me?" than, "What can I do for you?" In fact, in a recent survey, 96 percent of Britons who responded said people were more likely to claim compensation for injury today than they were 10 years ago.

"One of the things that people said was that the community spirit and the idea of the stiff upper lip was decreasing at the same rate as individualism and greed were increasing," said Mr. Hooker of Norwich Union, which commissioned the study.

But one person's outrageous lawsuit can be another's justified assertion of rights. Consumer advocates say that the trend is a welcome exercise in self-assertiveness by a nation that used to be too meek.

"We used to say, 'Don't rock the boat,' but people are more confident now," Janice Allen, a spokeswoman for the National Consumer Council, an advocacy group, said in an interview. "The stiff upper lip - that is a day that has gone now. People are much less deferential than they were 50 years ago and less prepared to put up with poor service."

Colin Ettinger, president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, scoffed at a notion that Britain was awash in frivolous American-style lawsuits. A recent report, he said, concluded that just two-thirds of motorists, and one-third of workers, filed complaints after accidents. Although there have been steady increases in these complaints in recent years, he said, government statistics show that claims in some areas actually decreased over the last year.

As far as there is a cultural shift toward complaining, he said it was a phenomenon of the younger, more assertive generations. "It's not a bad thing if people do question," he said. "Everybody needs to be accountable."

The effect of the change on British society is hard to quantify, in part because the government did not keep comprehensive records of claims before 2000 and because most cases are dropped before a formal complaint is made. But according to a 2002 report by the Institute of Actuaries, £10 billion, or $18.6 billion, in compensation is paid out annually. The Local Government Association, which represents councils across England and Wales, said 68 percent of its member councils had experienced increases in tenuous claims since 2000.

The National Health Service recently reported that its 2002 bill for clinical negligence claims, including legal costs and settlements, was £466 million, or $867 million, compared with £1 million in 1974, or £6.3 million adjusted for inflation. In March 2003, the estimated value of all outstanding claims against the health service was nearly £6 billion.

The threat of lawsuits has driven up insurance premiums and caused institutions like schools and local governments to alter the way they go about their business.

Some schools have canceled sports like rugby and soccer; others have closed playgrounds. Still others have abolished recess altogether, said Martin Ward, deputy general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, which represents principals and other secondary-school officials.

Newspapers delight in publishing outrageous examples of how the compensation culture is said to be ruining childhood pastimes. Some schools, for instance, have banished as too dangerous the traditional game of conkers, in which players stage fights with chestnuts tied to strings.

"It's now increasingly difficult to contemplate doing anything that might in any sense be deemed dangerous," Mr. Ward said, and parents and students are becoming more likely to blame the schools for students' failings. "There are an increasing number of instances where children are claiming, for instance, that they've been hit by teachers, when in fact they're just upset at being disciplined," he said.

"Back in the 1970's, at a parents' evening, if you said, 'John's doing rather well, but perhaps he could work a little harder,' Dad would support the system, as it were," he added. "Now if you say something like that, you're likely to get the reaction: 'It must be your fault. What are you going to do about it?' "

[promethius9594]

why do i see the late (and decrepit) roman empire in several of today's modern "enlightened" nations? are we really an envisioned people, or are we just playing the same old song again, and drawing near to that same end?

[John D Harris]

I keep telling you folks we need another "Good Dark Ages", I'm rooting for an asteroid, a small comet would do, maybe a thermal Nuclear exchange, or even a world wide economic disaster, just something to clear the underbrush out.