How Pringles Make The Lawyers Fat

How Pringles Make the Lawyers Fat The taxpayer has been stung again… The lawyer4s are extremely happy… Isn’t there a better way to do this..? Dear Reader,
Mr Justice Warren has made a decision. It was not easy.

Only after endlessly pacing his chambers to and fro, after much stroking of the judicial chin, after much hum-ing and ha- ing and lying awake at night in deep and weighty contemplation has he come to his conclusion.

The court was hushed and expectant as he delivered his verdict. ‘A Pringle,’ he stated in tones of grave severity, ‘is not made from potato, or from potato flour, or from potato starch within the legal requirement. And so the Pringle is exempt from VAT.’

It seems that Mr Justice Warren was ultimately swayed by the words of Richard Cordara, QC, representing his client, the Pringle. ‘The appearance and taste of a Pringle is not that of a potato crisp, M’Lud.’ he argued. ‘It has none of the irregularity and variety of shape that is always present in crisps.’ A telling point, indeed! And he went on. ‘The Pringle has a shape not found in nature, being designed and manufactured for stacking, and giving a pleasing and regular undulating appearance which permits comfortable eating.’

He paused to allow Mr Justice Warren to reflect upon the great discomfort that can be caused by the dangerous potato crisp, and then delivered this powerful summing up.

‘A Pringle does not taste like a crisp or otherwise behave like one. Crisps give a sharply crunchy sensation under the tooth and have to be broken down into jagged pieces when chewed. It is totally different with a Pringle, which is designed to melt down upon the tongue.’

In fact the decisive factor in the case of the Revenue & Customs vs the Pringle seems to have been that Pringles have a potato content of less than 42% - the balance being something akin to wallpaper paste and fine sand – and as such are more of a biscuit than a crisp. And so they are exempt from VAT.

It cost you and me

Now I could not care less about this, although I concede that the Pringles’ manufacturer Procter & Gamble does care. But what does bother me is that Revenue & Customs will be paying the legal costs of £100,000.

That is £100,000 of tax-payers money being transferred into the fur-lined pockets of lawyers, who no doubt took the case frightfully seriously, spun it out for months and months, and came to Court with the mountains of paper that they think justify the huge fees that they charge.

And all this when the matter could have been settled no less fairly, and at zero cost to the tax-payer, just by going out into the street and asking one hundred snack-eaters whether they would or would not call a Pringle a crisp.

If more than fifty said it is, then case closed, and Procter & Gamble could get on with the business of inventing undulating snack food and the legal profession could get on with the job of locking up criminals.

Anybody who has ever been involved in a legal case knows how they acquire a life of their own. Once in the tender care of the lawyers, even the simplest issue is spun out into something far more complicated and a matter that could be settled in five minutes runs on and on for months and months.

Only last week-end I was talking to an elderly couple who had been involved in a trivial boundary dispute with their neighbour. The latter was difficult, inconsistent and bloody-minded and refused to go to arbitration. Only after three year of wrangling did she lose the case, but not before this elderly couple had run up legal bills of £15,000.

Here is another example of the sort of case that should never go to court. This concerns Michael Rockall, who bought a home in Suffolk and set about clearing the overgrown garden. In the process he chopped down some alders, described by him as ‘tiddly little things.’ This was noticed by the eagle-eyed public servants of Lowestoft and Mr Rockall found himself in court accused of ‘felling trees without a license.’ Like that other matter of national importance, the nature of the Pringle, this ended up in London’s High Court where Lord Justice Moses decided that what Mr Rockall had been doing was essentially weeding his garden rather than forestry, and as such had not been breaking the law.

What seems wrong is that these cases ever get to the High Court where they take up the time and highly paid brain-power of our top legal minds. I am no expert in the workings of the law, but I would have thought that all three cases above could and should have been decided far more quickly and at much reduced cost.

In each of them both sides could have been asked to make their case on one sheet of paper, submit it to a magistrate and then abide by the decision. The outcome would probably have been no different, the cost would have been considerably less and if one party had walked away feeling aggrieved then I don’t suppose that any amount of extra spending on the legal process would have soothed these feelings.

Otherwise perhaps arbitration could be compelled by the wish of one party, rather than requiring the assent of both. I don’t know. But I am sure that the huge amounts of money transferred to the legal profession are often out of all proportion to the issues involved or the benefits to the rest of us.

And I am also sure that anxiety that the legal process inflicts, and the cost to business and to the individual that is the consequence of the endless new laws imposed upon us are never captured by any measure of the cost of government upon society. If you enjoyed this article then sign up for Red Hot Penny Shares. Its aim is simple: to lead you straight to the undiscovered, unloved, under-priced small cap shares destined to become the big boys of the future…

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