Whatever happened to personal responsibility?

I remember the good old days when we used to pick up the newspaper and have a laugh at our cousins on the other side of the pond for suing each over the most ridiculous things.

There was a story about a man who stole a motorbike, crashed it, then sued the owner because of the injuries he sustained. There was a woman who sued a shop because she had tripped over a toy left in the middle of an aisle, a toy her own child left there. And of course there was the woman who sued a well known fast food chain because she spilled a cup of hot coffee over herself. I’ve no idea how true any of these stories were but I’m sure you get the picture.

During my first trip to New York I remember having a chuckle at the adverts on the metro – 1800 DIVORCE, 1800 LAWYERS, 1800 WESUE4U. Okay so I made that last one up, but every single advert related to the legal profession and how best to get money out of someone else.

I think it was all so amusing because it was all so far away.

Those days are now long gone. More and more adverts feature on UK television suggesting you should get legal advice on any little accident you may have had. Am I even allowed to use the word accident anymore? As I write this there are probably lawyers trying to get it removed from the dictionary because there is no such thing as an accident, someone must always be at fault.

It is becoming more and more common for people to automatically think “who can I blame?” and “what can I get out of this?” whenever they have an accident. It's always someone else's fault, there no longer seems to be any sense of personal responsibility. The lawyers are probably right, someone is always at fault, but more often than not, the fault rests with the person who injured themselves in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for people being compensated when there is genuine need, when they have suffered long term damage as a result of someone else's actions. People should be held to account when they have been negligent, or perhaps even if they have just made an honest mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.

I fell down my father’s stairs recently. Maybe I should sue him for having stairs that are too narrow. Perhaps I should take legal action because he hadn’t taken the necessary precautions to ensure the carpet had enough grip to enable safe passage. On the other hand, perhaps I should just be a bit more careful in future and apologise to my father for waking him up in the middle of the night as I clattered down the stairs.

So the next time you have an accident and start to think how you can profit from it, just take a moment to think it through. Maybe you should look where you’re going next time. Maybe you should be less clumsy in the future. Maybe, just maybe, the accident was just your own stupid fault.

Despite mentioning the possibility of legal action in this post, it does not negate what I said in a previous post on whether first aiders can be sued if they get it wrong. No one has ever been successfully sued in the UK for carrying out first aid.