Day 163 - 25 Sep 95 - Page 38
1 expense and weeks, if not months, of additional court time
2 is, therefore, at least a possibility as a consequence of
3 the amendment, then the court in its discretion can quite
4 properly say: "No, it is too late; we do not need these
5 amendments any more to do justice in the case, and the
6 unfairness caused to the other side by allowing them and to
7 the litigants who are waiting in the queue demand, as a
8 matter of justify and discretion, that the amendments
9 should be refused".
10
11 My Lord, in relation to the Store Hygiene proposals or
12 proposed amendments, I would notice this, first of all,
13 that the document from which they are extracted appears to
14 have been sent to or received by the Defendants as long ago
15 as March 1995. That is what the fax date on the front of
16 it says. I have no fax date on the child labour violations
17 document.
18
19 The second thing I would respectfully suggest is this: If
20 one looks at these -- I have numbered all the paragraphs so
21 I have 12 paragraphs under Store Hygiene but there is not
22 as many allegations as that; it is less than 12 -- none of
23 them falls within what one might call the mainstream of the
24 food poisoning allegation or the food poisoning issue in
25 the case.
26
27 The food poisoning issue in the case was derived from two
28 passages in the leaflet originally. One, my Lord, was
29 under the Children's Advertising section in the right-hand
30 column -- in this copy it is the fourth page -- where the
31 pamphlet says: "Not a lot of children are interested in
32 nutrition and even if they were all the gimmicks and
33 routines of paper hats and straws and balloons hide the
34 fact that the food they are seduced into eating is at best
35 mediocre, at worst poisonous". That is No. 1.
36
37 Then No. 2 is on page 5 in the left-hand column in the box
38 headed: "What's your poison?" which contains an allegation
39 both that the meat is dangerous because it contains or may
40 contain poisonous bacteria, food poisoning bacteria, and
41 because it contains these so-called residues.
42
43 My Lord, that being so, these allegations about mouse
44 droppings, no chemicals, flies and so on and so forth that
45 we find in this proposed amendment are at the best of only
46 peripheral relevance to the case. One may suspect --
47 I cannot prove it -- that this is something of a desperate
48 last throw by the Defendants to get something on the issue
49 of food poisoning, given first that they have had the
50 source for these allegations for as long as they have and
51 have done nothing with them -----
52
53 MS. STEEL: I think that if Mr. Rampton is going to keep making
54 that assertion he should actually come out with some
55 concrete evidence that we did have those.
56
57 MR. RAMPTON: I have said what my evidence is. It is the fax
58 date on the document.
59
60 MS. STEEL: Yes, and I think that Mr. Morris has said on
