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And you freely admit it, therefore there is nothing wrong with me referring to you as a wanker in the furture.
In this case though McD's challenged the comments made and therefore the McLibel two had a duty to substantiate their claims. As they couldn't, the court was left with no option to rule that they had lied.
Now, if the two can prove their claim after the fact, then McD's would be in contempt and would have perverted the course of justice... becuase they defended the claims and knew them to be true. It's pretty simple really
And, if they had legal aid it would all have turned out very differently. MaccyDs relied on the fact that they could outflank them with £10 million of legalese.
I'm not convinced that someone who accuses someone of libel would be done for contempt.....
And, at the end of the day, truth is subjective, not objective.
If I were to say Lee Bowyer was a racist lowlife, I would be telling the truth. Could I prove it in court? Probably not.
but i used to work for them many moons ago, didnt eat there while on my break, and as for the low paying thing, i was a part time worker in 6th form who was earning about 80% of what i am now (hourly rate) so i cant shake too many sticks at that
You can fudge the point all you want, but the court decided that Steel and Morris defamed McDonald's. They said things that they couldn't prove at all, and didn't care about the accuracy of their claims because of their intent to defame McDonald's.
I'm surre Steel and Morris are dedicated political campaigners, yaddayaddayadda, but the simple fact of the matter is that the civil legal aid pot is decreasing rapidly, and instead of campaigning about this they decide that they are entitled to drain it, and that their political campaigning is more important than the poor woman losing her house and kids in a divorce settlement. Screw the people who need the legal aid, defaming McDonald's is far more important :rolleyes:
And no, it wasn't a fair battle. That's not my point. My point is that them defaming McDonald's should not be entitled to legal aid, and these people are obviously very selfish if they feel that they deserve to drain the legal aid pot ahead of people who actually need it for important things, such as housing or custody disputes.
I'm sure all the people who can't get legal aid for slightly more pressing civil disputes will rejoice knowing that two morons were entitled to it in order to defend their lies against a company.
He didn't say that.
What he said was that it is more important that the mother with kids gets to fight for their house, than it is for a couple of people who wilfully defamed a major corporation get the money to defend themselves.
Basically, if they hadn't defamed McD then legal aid wouldn't have been an issue, and like it or not they did lose.
Personally I support their cause and I am pleased that they won on some points, but that doesn't mean that I give them carte blanche to say what they like and then pick up the tab for their defence costs.
The point about legal aid is that you don't know when you apply for it whether your case will be successful. If they had been able to do more preparation than reading papers on the tube on the way to court, they might have been able to prove that more of the statements were justified. Our civil justice system is nominally based on two equal parties presenting their cases to a judge, or judge and jury. Here's an interesting question - if legally aided, would counsel for the two defendants been able to successfully oppose the move to do away with the jury? Probably not considering how long the case lasted, but I imagine a jury would have been far less likely to conclude that McDonalds had been unjustifiably defamed by the publishing of the leaflet.
Because they didn't have legal aid, they were less able to adequately put the case that they hadn't committed libel. So, (with respect to Kermit) to use the fact that they lost as weight in the argument that they shouldn't have received legal aid is putting the cart before the horse.
Nevertheless, the atrocious state of the legal aid budget is an important consideration. Maybe a more sensible solution would be to consider ruling that corporations cannot be defamed. After all, if you compare the amount of money that was spent on those leaflets with the McPropaganda on TV....