Only the Brits

Wednesday 3rd January

I caught a piece on BBC News this morning.  It was reporting that many Hoteliers in Spain and Greece were now refusing to take British Holidaymakers on all-inclusive holidays.  The reason being that there has been a 5,000 per cent increase in insurance claims for food poisoning in the last three years.  Yes that figure really is 5000% – that is an increase of fifty times the number tree years ago.  They are almost all exclusively from Brits who on returning to Blighty claim they have been stricken with food poisoning.  There is no way the travel insurance companies can check this as symptoms can often be quite short-lived.  What people don’t realise is that the Travel Insurance companies recharge the Hotel in question.  It is up to those Hoteliers to claim on their own insurance – and their insurance companies are now refusing to pay up.

Now, I know some people have queasy tummies and a few cases may be genuine, but it is almost certain that these are actually false claims.  I had heard years ago of people deliberately ‘losing’ expensive cameras or watches on holidays abroad – and this is just the same.  It is old-fashioned fraud.  Whiplash claims are also huge in Britain and pushing up Motor Insurance for the rest of us.  It is obvious why people do this – make false claims, that is.  They think it is a victimless crime, that nobody gets hurt, that the insurance companies can afford it, or simply because someone has told them about it and it is too good an opportunity to let slip by.

But, of course there are no victimless crimes, someone always has to pay.  Downloading music from Pirate Bay for nothing hurts the artist as they don’t get the Royalties.  Ripping off Insurance Companies pushes premiums up for all of us.  Not declaring taxable income, such as private rents dimishes the tax revenues so there are more cuts in services.

And this seems to be a particularly British Disease.  I wonder if there is something in our National Character which means we are happy to be crooks.  Many Directors I have worked for fiddle their expenses; London is the world centre of Money Laundering and if the Daily Mail is to be believed all benefit Claimants are crooks too.  Maybe we would all ‘fiddle’ somehow if we could, maybe this is why there is this huge increase in false travel insurance claims.  Who knows, but it seems sad to me.