Day 052 - 21 Nov 94 - Page 48


     
     1        sorts of answers that your Lordship felt uncomfortable with
     2        my original decision not to cross-examine him any further.
     3
     4        My Lord, that takes us to 5th October.  The Defendants by
     5        those answers, and I dare say other ones in Professor
     6        Crawford's evidence, with some help from your Lordship have
     7        arrived at a position, whether by good luck, accident or
     8        design, that they have raised a case in relation to diet
     9        and cancer -- not McDonald's food and cancer but diet and
    10        cancer -- which needs to be met by the Plaintiffs and goes
    11        some little way to meeting the Plaintiffs' complaint about
    12        the leaflet.
    13
    14        That said, and I make no comment about the weight of the
    15        evidence or how the issues should be resolved at this stage
    16        of course, but that said it is simply not open to the
    17        Defendants to suggest that by stating the case in the way
    18        which we now seek to do, or I should say restating the case
    19        in the way which we now seek to do in the Statement of
    20        Claim, the Defendants have suffered any kind of injustice
    21        or prejudice.  I am perfectly open, as I have said before,
    22        to any reasonable suggestion that Professor Crawford should
    23        come back and give new evidence (though I do not believe
    24        that he needs to) or that Dr. Arnott should come back and
    25        given new evidence, though there again if one reads the
    26        whole of his cross examination it is perfectly apparent
    27        that it relates entirely to this question of causation.
    28        But there is plenty of time.
    29
    30        The Defendants do not face any kind of difficulty in, as it
    31        were, recasting the questions which they have originally
    32        asked.  It is annoying for all of us, I have no doubt, but
    33        there is no injustice to them.  It has not cost them
    34        anything.  There is no great throw-away of money.  That is
    35        all on the basis that they have not all along been
    36        perfectly well aware of what the issue actually is.
    37
    38        I have no authority of this, but I do not myself believe it
    39        to be the law on the authorities that I have read this
    40        morning, that a defendant or a party who resolutely refuses
    41        to listen or to read what is said in court and clutches to
    42        himself a concept of the issues in the case which is
    43        divorced from objective reality, has any right to say to
    44        the court When eventually the scales are torn from his
    45        eyes: "Oh, I am prejudiced by this. I never realised what
    46        the case was actually about."
    47
    48        Certain it is, in my submission, that a court entertaining
    49        an application of this kind which in justice, other things
    50        being equal, ought to be allowed so that the true issue can 
    51        be decided by the court, in such a case the court ought not 
    52        to deny the plaintiff justice, the applicant justice, 
    53        simply because, if it be the case, the other party (in this
    54        case the Defendants) have kept their heads buried in the
    55        sand, not likely to take on board what was the issue which
    56        they had to meet, if they were to have any hope of
    57        succeeding in the case.
    58
    59        That said, I know that your Lordship, and I would
    60        respectfully endorse your Lordship's position in this

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