Obiter ( UK Law Soc Gazette)
Obiter was at a college reunion the other weekend, and it’s interesting how the years drop away with the help of a prosecco or 13, sitting on a sun-kissed lawn with a judge, a couple of doctors, musicians, a tech entrepreneur and a climate scientist.
Sir Keir Starmer may have to wait for a famously protected Friday evening to glance over his shoulder at the man he’s been.
Helpfully, the website Politics Home has saved him some time. Last October it got in touch with Helen Steel and David Morris, the environment and human rights activists sued for libel by McDonald’s, and assisted in their defence by Starmer, then a young Doughty Street barrister. He did it pro bono until the case reached the European Court of Human Rights.
‘He was great back then,’ Steel told Politics Home. ‘He helped us for free for a very, very long time… he was giving us advice behind the scenes, drafting pleadings for us, stuff like that.’ A good ‘socialist lawyer’, she’s noted elsewhere.
The judgment was not an outright win for either side – some of the claims in the ‘McLibel’ leaflets the pair had distributed were found to be true, but others were defamatory and they were also ordered to pay McDonald’s £40,000, though this was never enforced. The episode had already been a long drawn out PR disaster for the restaurateur.
Any thoughts on the Labour leader now? ‘I think him becoming a politician was a great loss for the legal world in the sense of human rights,’ Morris answered.
Is a reunion in prospect? Steel says: ‘I think his phone number has changed.’ From memory, a security precaution Boris Johnson spent a period shunning.
When Keir Took On McDonalds
Before he was Labour leader, Keir Starmer fought for the underdog in a few headline-grabbing cases as a barrister. Zoë Grünewald speaks to the defendants in the infamous McLibel case
“Dave and Helen are an extraordinary couple”, a slim, fresh-faced Keir Starmer intones, a jumble of files behind him in footage now more than 25 years old. “When I first met them, they really didn’t know very much about the law at all, and they certainly didn’t know very much about libel law. But they’ve worked away and grappled away with mountains of evidence and really difficult legal concepts and between them they form now a very good team.”
The story of how the young human rights lawyer helped a couple of activists, Helen Steel and David Morris, take on and best McDonald’s is a central text in the Starmer cannon. It helped more than a few members overcome their doubts and vote for the former shadow Brexit secretary when he ran for Labour’s leadership.
But what do the pair think of Starmer now that he projects a rather more establishment image than the “progressive barrister” of the 1990s? Their answers will resonate with many of the Labour members who voted for Starmer, partly on the basis of his former work as a campaigning lawyer, but now fret he has forsaken his past radicalism.
The pair, still friends, live in very different parts of the country – Steel in the rugged hills of Derbyshire and Morris in the cosmopolitan streets of London’s Haringey. Asked for their reflections they are a little guarded at first, understandably, given their extraordinary story. The infamous McLibel trial was a landmark case between McDonald’s and the two environmental activists, Steel and Morris, back in 1997. The battle revolved around a pamphlet, distributed by the pair, entitled “What’s Wrong With McDonald’s?: Everything They Don’t Want You to Know”, containing a range of allegations against the company, including claims about its exploitation of workers, contributions to deforestation, the promotion of unhealthy eating habits, and disregard for animal welfare.
https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/keir-took-mcdonalds
