Day 052 - 21 Nov 94 - Page 20


     
     1        amendments, particularly the first of them, is simply
     2        unsustainable -- it may even be disingenuous.
     3
     4        My Lord, at page 10, paragraph 3.1 of our skeleton
     5        argument -----
     6
     7   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Just before you go on to that, if you were
     8        not to obtain leave to amend, and if "linked with" as
     9        pleaded were thought to mean "less than causally linked
    10        with", the whole question of whether McDonald's food, in
    11        whatever quantity, causes serious degenerative disease or
    12        might lead to a risk of it would be out of court.
    13
    14   MR. RAMPTON:  Yes.
    15
    16   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Is that right?
    17
    18   MR. RAMPTON:  Of course, but it would mean there would be no
    19        libel; it would mean there would be no defence, because
    20        there is no point in defending an allegation which was not
    21        defamatory.  Simply to say of a kind of food, that a diet
    22        of food of this kind may give you cancer or heart disease
    23        is not a libel on McDonald's.  If that is what it meant,
    24        one would say to oneself:  "Well, so what?"  There would be
    25        no point in all the hours and hours, days and days of
    26        medical evidence that we have had; there would be no
    27        issue.  If the leaflet said what, for example, so many of
    28        McDonald's own leaflets have said:  "Look, be careful.
    29        Don't eat too much of this; eat a balance died; eat lots of
    30        vegetable, fruit, fish" and so on and so forth, we would
    31        not be here on this part of the case at least.  Dr. Arnott
    32        would not have been there; Professor Wheelock would not
    33        have been there; Professor Keen would not have been there,
    34        and I doubt whether Dr. Barnard and Professor Crawford
    35        would have been there either for that matter.
    36
    37        My Lord, I shall in due course come, I hope, to show your
    38        Lordship, not only that we have approached the whole of
    39        this part of the case ever since July 1993 at least on the
    40        basis that the assertion was that McDonald's food causes
    41        these degenerative diseases, but that the Defendants and
    42        their witnesses have approached it on exactly the same
    43        basis, starting with Dr. Barnard way back in 1993 and going
    44        right the way through to Professor Crawford, passing on the
    45        way (and I shall show your Lordship the passages, or some
    46        of them because they are almost endless) cross-examination
    47        by the Defendants of Dr. Arnott.
    48
    49        My Lord, we put this submission really in three ways, or it
    50        is not really three ways of putting the same submission: 
    51        There are three roots to the same conclusion that the 
    52        Defendants have known all along, in effect, what the case 
    53        was about or this part of the case was about.
    54
    55        We, the Plaintiffs, have always made it clear in court what
    56        we thought this part of the leaflet accused them of.  On
    57        some occasions, as I have already mentioned to your
    58        Lordship, different judges -- your Lordship included --
    59        appeared to have read the existing pleading with the word
    60        "linked" as having the meaning "causes".  On one occasion,

Prev Next Index