Taking a bite out of Big Mac

Helen Steel, one of the two co-defendants in the McLibel trial - the longest trial in English legal history - took a break in Scotland to get away from the court. One day she was out climbing Ben Lomond, one of the remotest heights in Britain, when she got to the summit she met someone wearing a McDonald's T-shirt.
Ken Smith.

 
This tormenting moment in 'McLibel: Two Worlds Collide', sums up the all-pervasive natrue of the McDonald's multinational. 12 years ago as a member of London Greenpeace, Helen Steel and Dave Morris handed out a leaflet called "What's Wrong With McDonald's?". For carrying out this simple act of fair comment on the atrocities of this multinational their libes were to be turned upside for for the next decade.

It is a credit to their determination, grit and stamina that they saw the case through to the end and won a massive victory over McDonald's, where many other better funded organisations have crumbled.

The timely documentary by Franny Armstrong of One-Off Productions, 'McLibel: Two Worlds Collide' comes one year after the end of the trial and has itself attracted significant controversy.

Unlike other filmed accounts of the McLibel case, this documentary takes up the trial directly through the words of the defendants and their supperters themesleves. BBC and Channel 4 had originally expressed an interest in showing the film but backed off under legal pressure.

The film is unashamedly partisan but it is not crude propaganda. It simply brings out the details of the trial in a sympathetic and accessible way with devastating effect.

Helen Steel herself comments in the film that it was frustrating to spend hours in an interview with a journalist only to find them devoting paragraphs to what hair style she had or what clothes she was wearing.

This film sticks to the facts and presents them in their proper proportion and context and is well worth showing at Socialist Party meetings and other events.

The film itself, like the McLibel Two's own case, is fighting a one-sided battle against the propaganda stream. McDonald's spends $2 billion each year on advertising. It's estimated expendiuture on the trial was between £5 million to £15 milllion. Morris and Steel had just over £30,000 raised by the McLibel campaign.

The intransigent stand of Steel Morris and their supporters has marked them out as "heroes of our time" as one particiapnt describes them. Because they continued their action and because Franny Armstrong has made this very good film it will be forever remembered that McDonald's exploits children in its advertising, treats its workers in a dehumaising way with depressing wages, and also that McDonald's uses animal products which are produced involving at least nine examples of cruel practices.

That these words can be printed in this paper shows what the trial achieved, Before the trial's conclusion anyone making such claims would have felt the colossal weight of a McDonad's libel action pressing down on their shoulders.

The company's pursuit of Morris and Steel is summed up by Lynne Franks, described in the film as a 'PR guru', as "a PR disaster...that sums up the arrogance of the multinationals."

Dave Morris describes their victory as showing "how the workings of a huge multinational can be brought out in to the open." The resources available to tthose attempting such a task are extrememly limited. But as Dave Morris, Helen Steel and One Off Productions have shown, determination and political conviction can go a long way.  
 
 
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