The McLibel trial may now be over, but that's no reason to eat bad food and harm the Mother. Jerry Ross reports with attitude.
From time to time, ordinary people emerge as heroes
worthy of our admiration for their commitment,
dedication and principles in pursing (often against all
the odds) righteous crusades against ignorance,
injustice, lies and apathy.
David Morris and Helen Steel are two such people, who
took on a powerful multi-national corporation with
nothing more than their own time, energy, determination
and intelligence. The establishment might record their
names as environmentalists who took on the greed-head
bad food empire McDonnell's and lost (though it was a
hollow and costly victory). But the passage of time will
hopefully link their names with the beginning of the end
for the company itself.
In 1986 Dave and Helen, with other members of a group
called London Green peace (no connection with Green
peace International) leafleted customers outside
branches in London. The leaflets (entitled "What's Wrong
with McDonnell's? What they don't want you to know...")
told of some of the company's alleged business practices
and urged people not to eat there.
The leaflets made seven specific claims:
1.McBastards is partly responsible for hunger in the
Third World
2.McBastards is responsible for
destroying vast areas of rain forest in Central
America
3.McBastards food is unhealthy
4.McBastards lied when they claimed to use recycled
paper in their
packaging
5.McBastards exploit children with their marketing
and advertising
6.McBastards treat their
animals cruelly
7.McBastards treat their
employees badly
Unsurprisingly, McBastards were less than delighted that
sensible people might sensibly decide to take their cash
elsewhere and buy something sensible with it. With an
over-the-top attitude typical of greed-heads they swung
into action. Amongst other things - which one might
expect in a spy novel, but hardly in suburban London -
they consulted Special Branch about the campaigners and
hired private investigators to infiltrate London
Greenpeace to find out who was responsible for producing
the leaflets. This turned into something of a farce when
one of the investigators decided that there was more to
the members of London Greenpeace than beards and
open-toed sandals and ended up switching camps, having
formed a relationship with one of the campaigners!
Presumably, this only served to upset McBastards even
more who slapped writs on five protesters. Three went to
court and apologised. Dave and Helen rightly, and
bravely, told Ronald and Co. to burger right off.
It's very likely that McBastards couldn't have
anticipated this. After all, a company which thinks the
entire world wants "convenience" may have thought that
Dave Morris and Helen Steel would take the convenient
option of apologising and stopping their campaign. Then
the libel action would have been dropped and everybody
might have been happy.
But the consciences of committed environmentalists can
be darned inconvenient things; things that greed-head
executives of bad food multinationals can never fathom.
And Morris and Steel are that most dangerous of breeds -
determined people with nothing to lose. The scene was
set for what became the longest running civil trial in
British legal history.
It's worth pausing here to examine how libel trials are
conducted in the UK. Unlike the US., where the pursuer
has to prove that the defendant's claims are false, here
the defendant has to prove that their claims are true.
This means that Dave and Helen had to find evidence and
witnesses to prove their leaflets told the truth. The
Court can order that information must be disclosed by
one side to the other - so, for example, Helen and Dave
could have forced McBastards to provide information
about their waste recycling to try to prove their point
(see no. 4 above). But think about it: how likely is it
that anyone would just hand over evidence to prove that
their opponents are correct? Not very likely. (I could
have said "about as likely as finding a branch of
McBastards in a hospital" but there actually is one in
London!)
And if that weren't bad enough, there is no legal aid
available to assist people defending actions for libel
in the UK. So Dave and Helen had to undertake all their
own research, seek out and interview their own expert
witnesses, represent themselves in court and generally
take seven years out of their lives to fight the case.
Their only assistance came from donations, which offset
their research costs, and from caring lawyers, including
Keir Starmer QC, who gave them his advice for nothing.
Meanwhile, McBastards (which, with a turnover of $32
billion, can afford more lawyers than there are lawyers
to afford) employed a top QC and an entire firm of
solicitors to prepare the case against these two
ordinary people. It is estimated that their legal costs
to prepare for and run the three year trial amounted to
£10 million (or, put another way, 5.5 million Big Craps.
Sorry, Macs).
Now just stop and think for a minute. On one side we
have an enormously powerful trans-national company with
almost as much money and power as the oil-rich African
state of Nigeria. On the other side, we have two
environmental campaigners and a bunch of leaflets. This
is real fly-on-elephant's-arse stuff, and no mistake.
Great Caesar's Ghost! - why on earth spend serious
amounts of time, effort and moolah (£10 million!!!) to
drag these people through court? After all, even if
McBastards won, what could they do? They couldn't
extract damages or even cover their costs from the
virtually penniless Dave and Helen, whose joint income
is around £7,500 a year, that's for sure.
Could it be that McBastards truly believed that all the
campaigners' claims were false and wanted to set the
record straight once and for all? Certainly, that's what
they'd have us believe. But that cannot be true because
the court did not agree, and found that some of Dave and
Helen's allegations were indeed true.
Or is it that they knew perfectly well that some or all
of the claims were correct and that the company would
suffer if these facts became widely known? If this is
the case then McBastards were acting as nothing more
than playground gangsters with enough dinner money to
pay bullies to silence the protesters with the threat of
legal action.
In the event, the trial commenced in Summer 1994 with
the Judge, Lord Chief Justice Bell, showing a good deal
of humanity in allowing Dave Morris to use his chambers
when he had to bring his son to court and suspending
business on school half-term holidays. Unfortunately,
Richard Rampton QC, for McBastards, was less
down-to-earth and objected strongly to Dave (a
self-confessed anarchist with no particular respect for
the pomp and ceremony of the courtroom) referring to him
by his first name. "He'll be calling me Dickie next!" he
complained to the Judge, as sniggers ran around the
court.
Up until last month, when the judgement on the case was
announced, you might have been forgiven for not knowing
it was even in progress, since it was so under-reported
in the media. In the UK. only the Guardian and the
Observer made any real effort to follow the trial as it
progressed (which in itself speaks volumes about which
papers are worth reading). But the verdict itself was
big news all over the world and a hollow victory for
McBastards who have probably endured more deservedly bad
publicity as a result than they have ever done in their
history.
Although McBastards won the case and were awarded
£60,000 damages (for which they promptly announced they
would not pursue Helen and Dave for - nice public
relations move, but we're not fooled!) this was but a
fraction of the damages that they might have been
awarded had their case been proved outright. In fact,
the Judge decided that parts of the London Greenpeace
leaflet told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but
the truth.
And don't forget that just because something is found
untrue in court does not mean it's not actually true. It
just wasn't proven true, and since one side spent
£10,000,000 on its case and the other had no money of
its own, it is hardly surprising. For example,
McBastards cows are grazing at this very moment in areas
of former rain forest in Brazil and Guatemala. Even
McBastards don't deny this. But this isn't enough to
successfully proved to a London court that McBastards
caused the destruction of the rain forest.
Luckily, most Heads can add two plus two to make four!
Many will feel it is wise to follow the "no smoke
without fire" school of though and avoid this nasty
company's outlets on the precautionary principle that,
until proven otherwise, "once a McBastard, always a
McBastard."
However, it is "Sand in McBastards' Vaseline" time;
let's look at some of Justice Bell's findings which went
against the crass corporation (chew on THESE,
greed-heads!):
PROVEN FACT: McBastards are "culpably responsible" for
cruelty to animals. They restrict the movement of laying
hens, broiler chickens and pigs. They slit the throats
of animals while they are still fully conscious. I need
say not a word more.
PROVEN FACT: McBastards pays its workers low wages,
helping to depress wages for workers in the catering
trade. The Judge found that McBastards didn't
specifically try to exploit disadvantaged groups but,
er.. hang on a minute. Who would happily work for £3.05
an hour except disadvantaged people? Rocket Scientists?
The Council of Europe, incidentally, sets a decent
threshold of pay at a minimum of £5.88 per hour.
Clearly, McBastards are far from a decent and ethical
employer.
PROVEN FACT: McBastards exploit children by using them,
as more susceptible subjects of advertising, to
pressurise their parents into going to McBastards. The
mechanism of this advertising is simple yet insidious;
trap kids into believing they are not normal if they
don't go there for bad food and free plastic toys. Dave
Morris tellingly called they adverts "sermons of the
modern religion of consumerism."
PROVEN FACT: Even though the claim that McBastards food
is bad for you was found not true "if it is eaten
occasionally", McBastards' nutritional claims for their
products do not match reality (think about it! If eating
a lot of salt and saturated fat-laden shit is going to
harm you, why eat any of this shit at all???).
It is so easy to take a walk through your neighbourhood
and forget that the McBastards on your High Street is
only one of over 21,000 world-wide. Make no mistake.
This is a fuck-off, seriously rich and very, very nasty
corporation. It is the world's biggest buyer of beef
from Moscow to Mogadishu (one in every 12 cows become a
Big Mac) and is destroying the Mother at a bit of a clip
by anyone's standards. Its vehicles travel 112,000 miles
a week on Britain's roads, its UK stores produce 50 tons
of waste packaging weekly (and that doesn't include what
the feeble brains who actually eat this shit chuck away
in the street!) and, most worryingly, 10 million people
in the UK. every week are stupid enough to reward the
company for their squalid environmental record by buying
their products. They all deserve to barf on their
burgers.
Yet compared with huge multi-national companies like
General Motors, McBastards is still just a piss in the
ocean. What next? Trans-nationals with their own armies?
Territories? Nuclear weapons?
The only was to emasculate these greed-heads is to do it
financially. Dave Morris and Helen Steel took seven
years out of their lives to show the world that all is
not good in Ronald McBastard's playhouse. Of course, not
everybody has the commitment to do what these Heads did.
But you know the facts. Now go and do the right thing
for yourself and everybody else; skip McBastards and go
eat some real food.