It's what we do. It's all we do.

In an effort to defeat the much debated compensation culture, which some maintain is permeating England; Tories are proposing new restrictions on people's ability to sue for damages. These are only proposals at this point, but they will serve as one focal point of the conservative agenda and will likely spawn legislation and undoubtedly much debate.

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary stated that public institutions, like hospitals and schools, pay out billions a year in unjustified claims. He is expected to set out a slate of plans to place limits on liabilities for directors and organisations on Monday. He also wants to evaluate and perhaps scrap aspects of sex and race discrimination laws.

Mr. Davis' feeling is that these types of laws encourage people to sue and provide too much of an opportunity for people to take innocuous incidents and turn them into full blown scandals, resulting in compensation.

Increased compensation claims are the direct results of focusing on alleged 'people's rights' as opposed to personal responsibility, he said. One result of this mentality is the fact that it is harder for teaches to take their pupils on trips because they fear being sued for accidents. Schools paid out £200m in compensation over the last year, according to the Tories.

Elaborating on his plans in the Spectator magazine last week, Mr. Davis detailed an example of a serial murderer who successfully demanded and received hard-core pornography to his prison cell, citing his right to information, as evidence of personal rights trumping common sense and personal accountability.

Much of the blame, according to Mr. Davis, is the highly touted and equally largely criticized Human Rights Act, which is based on European definitions of rights. The definitions in that document differ greatly from traditional UK definitions of rights.

While they no doubt would like to, the Conservatives have not said that they wanted to scrap the law altogether.

The European Convention on Human Rights was adopted into UK law in 1998 under the Human Rights Act.

One immediate result was that Englanders no longer had to travel to Europe to plead their cases or enforce rights, but could make their challenges in British courts, saving time and money.

The compensation culture has come under heavy fire from business and government recently and has become a target for many a politician. It promises to be a major issue for years to come.

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