More fun on the telephone this week. I rang the Cornish Tourist Office to ask for the date of this year's eclipse.

"I'll have to get back to you on that one, sir," a young woman said. "I'm not sure we're holding one."

Then I rang Worcestershire County Council to ask whether they had yet filled their vacancy for a travellers' site warden. The previous postholder, you will remember, has just been awarded £203,000 in damages for having such a stressful job. No, there was no vacancy. The post in question had been re-organised and furthermore, they had "formalised their recruitment procedures." This presumably means that applicants now have to give details of their previous experience of being shot at.

Actually, it was the case of that site warden which caused this week's bout of apoplexy and which therefore fuels this column. It really does seem to mark a new high water mark for the compensation culture. "I have a problem, someone else must be to blame," is the current mantra of our society.

When burglars can sue factory owners because their factory roofs are not safe enough to burgle upon and when people can make an apparent living by bringing one case after another for discrimination, then things have clearly gone too far.

The real cost of this new culture is paid in terms of lost efficiency. Insurance premiums have escalated. Whole armies of people are now employed writing negligence policies and settling claims under them. In order to protect themselves most organisations are now adopting wordy policies and procedures which do little to help their effectiveness but provide a first line of defence against a potential lawsuit. Only in America is the situation still worse - and we are moving in their direction.

The companies which suffer most from the current enthusiasm for lawsuits are the smaller ones. Bigger outfits can employ people to write procedures and to put the necessary insurance protection in place. It is the smaller companies which are too busy just making a decent living to be concerned with the possible risks of litigation. They are honest, they tell themselves, they follow all Government regulations and their staff all seem happy so how could a problem arise? But it often does and they are totally unprepared.

Of course, in a developed country such as Britain, it is only right that we should seek to outlaw discrimination and award ourselves high standards of fairness. It is only right that we should impose and enforce a higher level of regulation than exists in more primitive economies. But there has to be a limit. And whatever it is, that limit should be determined by democratic means and not through the dubious passages of legal greed and judicial ignorance.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.