I came across a court case the other day that throws an interesting light on the unfairness of our ‘compensation culture’. It involved a supermarket customer who tripped over a basket which had been discarded near the checkout counter. She fell and injured her shoulder.

The woman sued alleging that the supermarket had been negligent. She won in the lower court but then lost in the Court of Appeal. She ended up with nothing for her troubles … but that’s not where the unfairness lies.

For that we have to look further at the Appeal Court’s reasoning. The court accepted the supermarket’s evidence that it had it good safety measures in place and had done all it reasonably could to prevent accidents happening.

The area was checked for potential hazards every five minutes or so. It was likely that the stray basket had been discarded by another shopper and had only been left there for a very short time. The court also accepted that the staff were trained to remove stray items and so it was difficult to see what more the supermarket could have done to prevent the accident.

It all seems so reasonable, so where is the unfairness?

Well, it lies in the fact that this story never got so much as a mention in the media. If the lady had been awarded £100,000 then the tabloids would have been screaming about the scandal of compensation culture gone mad. As she got nothing, as the judges behaved so reasonably, the story dies.

I don’t want to appear naïve. I was a journalist for more than 20 years and know that people behaving reasonably doesn’t attract much media attention. News needs to be out of the ordinary, so let me come at the issue from a different angle.

Let me amend it to say the unfairness is not so much that this story didn’t get any attention, but that the other side of the compensation culture argument never gets any attention.

I’m thinking, for example, of the cases where an accident victim is bullied by insurers into accepting a reduced compensation figure before they get the chance to get independent legal advice. That’s appalling too, isn’t it? How come we never hear about it?

The issue is particularly interesting in the light of Lord Young’s recent pronouncements on the subject when he launched his report Common Sense, Common Safety.

The extent of Lord Young’s ‘common sense’ may be called into question since he had to resign after his eccentric remarks about people being well off during the recession but we’ll let that pass. For now, let’s just look at the tone of that report and how it was presented by the government.

To be fair, it made something of a token gesture towards a balanced approach in that it talked about ‘perceived’ compensation culture, but such fine distinctions were never going to survive the rough and tumble of the media.

And even if there ever had been the slightest glimmer that this would put the record straight, the prime minister, David Cameron, shut it out immediately with this little gem of prejudice: ‘A damaging compensation culture has arisen, as if people can absolve themselves from any personal responsibility for their own actions, with the spectre of lawyers only too willing to pounce with a claim for damages on the slightest pretext. We simply cannot go on like this.’

Well, he’s right there. We simply cannot go on like this. We cannot tolerate this political opportunism and this playing to the gallery of tabloid journalism.

We cannot tolerate this one-dimensional approach because, make no mistake, the real scandal of the phrase ‘compensation culture’ is not that it leads to frivolous, unjustified claims but rather that it treats injury victims as if they’re scroungers on the make.

It makes people who’ve been seriously injured through someone else’s negligence feel guilty for seeking justice and fair compensation.

How did it come this? How did we arrive at a situation where innocent victims who may have had their lives shattered are seen as the bad guys while faceless, corporate insurance companies are seen as the good guys?

I shall express my views on this in another post, but in the meantime I would love to hear the opinions of personal injury specialists and other lawyers.

One other point before I finish. While it’s easy to criticise politicians and the media, the legal profession must also take some of the responsibility for allowing the myth of compensation culture to grow unchecked into the monster it has now become.

I’m not sure lawyers have done enough to counter the propaganda of the insurers and other interested parties.

But more of that in another post.

Nick Kehoe is a former television and newspaper journalist. He is now managing director at law marketing firm Media Coverage