Day 053 - 22 Nov 94 - Page 37
1 about advertising, Mr. Rampton said there was not an issue
2 about whether their advertising could be criticised, full
3 stop; it was only about whether their advertising could be
4 criticised because it was encouraging people to eat
5 unhealthy food. In the end, he did withdraw that remark,
6 and said: "Perhaps I may have been a bit too hasty." But
7 the point is, there was a whole point on it in the
8 Statement of Claim; and if we had listened to what he had
9 said, that would have been the end of it. We would have
10 thought: "Oh, well, we had better stop questioning about
11 that." He does make all kinds of very strange comments
12 for tactical advantage, to confuse us and, I think, to
13 confuse the court as well.
14
15 I mean, I have listed another example under 13, where
16 Mr. Rampton said that our "defence already says that the
17 Plaintiffs' advertising to children is much to be
18 reprobated because it deceives them into eating food
19 which.... is probably going to kill them." As you must be
20 well aware, that is nowhere to be found in the pleadings
21 and is not an issue in this case.
22
23 I do not know whether Mr. Rampton's comments that he makes
24 are standard practice for counsel in a case, but for
25 litigants in person I can say that it is actually extremely
26 confusing, and it makes our life very difficult when he
27 keeps coming up with comments like that and distracting us
28 from what we are trying to put, and we feel that we have to
29 deal with what he has said.
30
31 I mean, you may have noticed -- well, you have noticed --
32 that I have been trying to pick up on a lot of what he has
33 been saying, and you have actually said that I do not need
34 to pick every gauntlet he throws down. But the problem is
35 that, when we do not pick up the gauntlets, they get
36 interpreted as being something we agree with, and they get
37 in judgments. On that, I would refer to the judgment of
38 Drake J. that Mr. Rampton referred to yesterday.
39
40 MR. RAMPTON: Ms. Steel may be in a difficulty there, because I
41 do not think I was counsel before Drake J. on that
42 occasion. So perhaps she could depersonalise her remarks
43 just for the moment.
44
45 MS. STEEL: That is not a problem. Mr. Shields took exactly the
46 same line.
47
48 MR. JUSTICE BELL: What was the point on what Drake J. said,
49 that you want to make?
50
51 MS. STEEL: The point is that, to us, that just reflected -- it
52 was very difficult for us last year, because we were very
53 inexperienced; we had only been arguing at a handful of
54 hearings. When we tried to counter what Mr. Shields was
55 saying, we were told to sit and wait our turn, even when it
56 was something that we felt was a completely outrageous
57 statement. By the time it got to our turn to speak, we had
58 101 other things that we had to deal with as well, and some
59 of the corrections slipped by us. But, as a result, they
60 ended up in judgments, and it looked as though we had not
