Yes, it is a British disease. Reporting a runway as wet when it is dry is as bad as reporting a runway as dry when it is wet. It may be perceived by someone as covering their backside by taking a 'worse case' position but all it really does is tell you that you are dealing with incompetence. And it should be treated as such. An Air Safety Report/MOR is appropriate in such cases; we should be able to rely on accurate and topical runway reports from ATC.
The interesting question is what values should we use for our performance? Fortunately our AOMs give little guidance. They merely imply you should use the appropriate values. Which is convenient because it means I (or even better, we) can decide for ourselves. So if a runway is plainly dry or damp, I'll use 'Dry' values. And as far as I am concerned, that is legal. The problem comes with 'Wet' and contaminated. The reason is that these are values are reported by unreliable and/or incompetent observers.
So do you go or not?
PM