The opinions expressed by John Blunt are not necessarily those of this newspaper

IF YOU really want to hit the jackpot, forget the National Lottery.

Instead, come over all poorly with stress. It's the ticket to a bumper pay-out.

Only last week, part-time council worker Beverley Lancaster got £67,000 for being traumatised by dealing with the public, for heaven's sake. Her bosses, Birmingham City Council, accepted the blame. I'll bet she's feeling loads better already.

Next to surrender was Liverpool City Council. It didn't even bother to fight home help supervisor Cath Noonan's stress claim in court after she said bullying by a colleague made her ill. She's now got £84,000 to cheer her up.

Remember that when you start to wilt - if it's a nasty workmate who has made you feel rotten rather than a stroppy member of the public, it's worth an extra seventeen grand.

But goodness knows what sort of earner ex-ambulanceman Gary Maddock might be in for as he's on the compensation bandwagon claiming to have been made ill by seeing dead people. Well, it's not fair to expect paramedics to deal with gruesome corpses as part of their job, is it?

Silly me would have thought it was, but 47-year-old Mr Maddock - targeting two NHS trusts with claims that they let stress ruin his life - says he suffers mood swings, depression and flashbacks of the horrific sights he's seen and is no doubt looking forward to plenty of pound-note signs to take his mind off it all. Yet does anyone every ask how our forbears survived the horrors and hardships they were exposed to - wars, the Blitz, no NHS or Welfare State, six o'clock starts at the mill, houses without central heating or hot water and so forth - without ending up as gibbering wrecks or with their hands plundering the taxpayers' pockets?

It is about time the courts asked this question when these claimants come wailing to them. For what is plainly afoot, with the assistance of lawyers, trade unions and counsellors keen to profit, is a determined effort to institutionalise stress as an accepted illness and to turn it into a rich seam for its alleged victims and a lucrative industry for their advisers and therapists - when it is nothing of the sort and when the pressures of modern living are nowhere as severe as those experienced by people in the past.

Just when will some judge or tribunal turn round and tell one of these so-called sufferers that they have already been paid for the aggro or angst of their job in the form of wages and to stop feeling sorry for themselves?

Tony and the foxy lady

THOUGH it could not knock the skin off a rice pudding, let alone win an election, long-subdued Old Labour has begun to shout the odds - motivated by the party's slip-up at the Euro elections and dinosaur John Prescott roaring back at Tony Blair over his attack on Luddite public sector workers.

So canny Tony gives them a treat to sidetrack them and shut them up - out of the blue he puts the outlawing of foxhunting on the government's agenda when, a year ago, he ensured it stayed off. But, then, when were somersaults of this sort outlawed in politics? Yet isn't a refreshing to see an occasional instance of constancy - like that displayed by Shadow Home Secretary, Ann Widdecombe, who sometimes seems to have a pair of foxes up her jumper?

She's against hunting and won't change her mind because the Tories are for it. Nor will she please her boss, William Hague, by leading for the Opposition on this issue.

She wants fox hunting banned because it's "morally indefensible," not because it is happens to be a useful political ploy. It's called integrity, Tony.

Ripped-off road users' revenge

I TOLD you so. Remember only last month I said: "William Hague will seize on Labour's anti-car mania just as he did with its desire to ditch the pound and run right over it."?

Well, now, he has - promising to end the vicious annual tax rises on petrol and the witch-hunt against motorists that John Prescott wants the town hall cranks to wage. Great! But, amazingly, as part of the kiss-and-make-up act they are putting on, even though he knows motorists are really fed up, in his Cabinet reshuffle Tony Blair is to let his Jaguar-owning deputy, Prescott - breezing in by helicopter into Silverstone for the British Grand Prix this week over the heads of motorists stuck in crawls on the rotten roads - stay in charge of transport despite the mess it's in.

Fine. Greater, then, will the backlash be from the country's car owners from whom the government will this year extract £36 billion in motoring taxes and then spend just £3.5 billion on the roads while planning to reduce even this over the next few years. Just you watch, the revenge of the ripped-off motorists will be a big issue of the next election.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.