http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,2763,1415031,00.html
The ruling is likely to be warmly welcomed by other social campaigners and groups.
Mr Morris, speaking ahead of the ruling, said today he and Ms Steel felt completely vindicated. Mr Morris told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "There's growing public concern and debate about the activities of the fast food industry and multinational corporations in general. We feel completely vindicated by our stance."<<
"We can see the effects of not just what McDonald's are doing but what all multinationals are doing to our planet."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4266209.stm
Their legal team said multinational companies should not be allowed to sue for libel because they wield huge power over people's lives and the environment and therefore should be open to scrutiny and criticism.
But government lawyers argued that campaigners for social justice are subject to the same laws of libel as anyone else, even when wealthy multinational corporations are their targets.
Reacting to Tuesday's decision, a spokesman for the Department of Constitutional Affairs said: "We are studying the judgement very carefully."
Celebrating the decision outside a London McDonald's, Mr Morris said they had won "both points hands down".
"We believe in people power and we believe people should make the decisions themselves in their own communities," he said.
"It encourages to people to speak up in their own interests."
Ms Steel described the 15-year case as a "complete nightmare" but said it had been good to fight it.
"Hopefully the government will be forced to change the law and that will mean greater freedom of speech," she said. <<
BBC radio commented that this would remedy an imbalance in the law, whereby at present the public is able to criticise central and local government agencies, but not big financial corporations without risk of libel actions.
My comment: The stringent laws on libel in Britain were applied unequally in that campaigners are not entitled to legal aid if finance capitalist corporations counterattack with an action for libel.
This increases the opportunities under bourgeois democratic law, for radical democratic groups to hold finance capitalist corporations to account, without being suject to an unequal judicial process in a libel court. It shifts the balance of bourgeois democracy marginally in the direction of peoples democracy. McDonalds have already accepted that their action was a public relations disaster, but this ruling will probably have to be implemented by the British Government, and finance capitalist organisations will have to factor it into their readiness to adapt their policies to respond to the demands of radical campaigners for social accountability and responsibility. Food is becoming a front line.
Chris Burford
London
