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,
