Day 310 - 04 Dec 96 - Page 10
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2 MR. RAMPTON: Of course they could. It is in the leaflet and
3 it goes to the sting.
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5 MR. JUSTICE BELL: It is an illustration of what I was saying
6 yesterday.
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8 MR. RAMPTON: Exactly; it goes to the sting of the libel.
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10 MR. JUSTICE BELL: If bringing in young people into the meaning
11 makes the meaning more severe than the one you have
12 pleaded, that means you cannot rely on it, but it does not
13 mean that the Defendants cannot rely on it.
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15 MR. RAMPTON: Yes. I would not accept that it did make it more
16 serious. It is just another aspect of the same kind of
17 misconduct.
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19 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes, I can see that there is that argument.
20 I think this is obvious, but I will put it anyway. Since
21 the general overall sting of paying bad wages for bad
22 working conditions, or paying bad wages and providing bad
23 working conditions, is there any difference?
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25 MR. RAMPTON: There is a difference between wages and
26 conditions, but -----
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28 MR. JUSTICE BELL: No, but it seems to me it may have some
29 significance because to say they pay low wages I can see
30 might not necessarily be defamatory, but I have tried to
31 give the example of the charity organisation. To say that
32 an employer's working conditions are bad, again, may not
33 necessarily be defamatory, because there are some areas of
34 work where the work clearly has to be done for the public
35 well-being, for the public good, but the working conditions
36 will be described as "bad" because you cannot avoid the
37 noise or you cannot avoid the dirt and the dust or you
38 cannot avoid, however hard you try, temperatures which are
39 high or temperatures which are low.
40
41 What may be defamatory is saying that you pay bad pay for
42 working in bad conditions, because if the bad conditions
43 are unavoidable one might say, "The least you can do is pay
44 handsomely for people to do it, and if you cannot pay very
45 much and your workforce willingly accepts that", visualise
46 the charity organisation, "then the least you can do is
47 make their working conditions as pleasant as possible".
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49 MR. RAMPTON: As you can afford, yes.
50
51 MR. JUSTICE BELL: So, if the defamatory sting is the
52 combination of the two -----
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54 MR. RAMPTON: My Lord, it plainly is when one looks at the
55 words -----
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57 MR. JUSTICE BELL: The first line of N.
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59 MR. RAMPTON: Yes. There are two reasons why that is so. The
60 first is that they are, in combination, given as the
