Day 143 - 27 Jun 95 - Page 36
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2 MR. JUSTICE BELL: 2 o'clock.
3
4 (Luncheon Adjournment)
5
6 MR. MORRIS: Just thinking about the discussion that was had --
7 it is a legal matter -- about the letter from the trade
8 union official.
9
10 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
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12 MR. MORRIS: The National Officer. McDonald's have tried to
13 justify the action by saying that we are motivated by
14 malice, and in the counterclaim their defence is that we
15 should be aware of the rightness of their position, or that
16 the leaflet is all lies because of the evidence that has
17 been available or the documents that have been available in
18 the case. It, surely, is relevant to our state of mind, at
19 least, that documents that we have disclosed, or documents
20 from the other side, contain things which back up our --
21 whether they are admissible as evidence ------
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23 MR. JUSTICE BELL: You may have a point to that effect if and
24 when you give evidence yourself. Putting malice on one
25 side for a moment, if you argue (as I anticipate you will)
26 saying that a leaflet which you are alleged to have
27 published, or participated in publishing, if saying that
28 such a leaflet is lies carries with it the imputation that
29 you as a publisher of it, if such you be, have lied, and if
30 you go on to say that you can only lie if you say something
31 which is untrue knowing that it is untrue, so that it is
32 relevant to look at your state of information and what you
33 actually believed at the time, then I can see an argument
34 (which I will not rule on at the moment in case there is
35 some dispute about it) that in relation to this or that you
36 will say: "Well, our state of information was this and,
37 whether we were right or wrong to do so, we believed what
38 we read".
39
40 But that is not the situation we are dealing with now. The
41 fact that a document may be material in some context which
42 has not yet been created does not, in my view, mean that
43 you can use it for another purpose where it is
44 inadmissible.
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46 At the moment, I am not minded to agree with your
47 contention that, for instance, a union is the best
48 institution to decide whether someone else or some other
49 company is anti-union, whatever the rights of wrongs of
50 that. I have to decide whether McDonald's is anti-union as
51 one of a large number of issues in this case and, if so, as
52 Mr. Rampton putting it in opening, whether that makes one
53 jot of difference.
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55 So, my ruling at the moment is that it is not permissible
56 to put the contents of this letter to Mr. Stein, although
57 you can perfectly well put the kind of question which
58 I put. But it is not legitimate, in my view, to put to
59 Mr. Stein what -- in this case there is no harm in
60 mentioning the union -- the Transport and General Workers
