EVEN though the galloping American-style compensation culture unleashed in our society has already delivered many affronts to both common sense and natural justice, surely, the height of effrontery is reached today with the claims by two policewomen who claim they suffered psychological trauma after the Dunblane massacre and are suing their force for £400,000 each.

But although there is little doubt that these two officers were subjected to harrowing strain as, on the dreadful day when 16 little children and their teacher were shot to death, they dealt with frantic parents of the dead and injured, their claims are nonetheless disgracefully presumptuous - and the condemnation of them in the community and, reportedly, by many of their colleagues can well be understood.

These women, like everyone employed with the emergency services, must have known that exposure to traumatic circumstances is part of the job.

Secondly, their allegation that they were denied adequate counselling after the shootings is hard to accept - when of all places where ample counselling must have been available and is no doubt easily obtainable still, it was at Dunblane after this tragedy. Even then, there are many who doubt the necessity for and value of counselling in any circumstance and would suggest, as does the grandparent today of one of those killed, that those exposed to the horror have simply to get on with their lives afterwards.

Yet, were it possible to deny such cogent arguments, these claims would still remain fundamentally insulting to justice and common values when they far exceed the compensation paid to relatives of the victims - indeed, we learn of a parent of one dead child actually being refused it - and when they are set against the derisory £4,500 paid to one child who was wounded twice.

As so often occurs in our justice system, it is the real victims who get forgotten - and the granting of these women officers' audacious claims would horrendously and insultingly compound that flaw.

This is like the outrage of the awards of £1.2 million to 14 police officers for the psychiatric damage they claimed to have sustained at the Hillsborough disaster - when some of the bereaved got nothing. And did not the Law Lords later block payments to other officers because this was unfair?

These new claims should be thrown out for this and all the other reasons and it remains staggering that they can be made at all.

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