You are in the company
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Roger Warren Evans
Roger Warren Evans
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You are in the company
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Roger Warren Evans |
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item0042D 726, 727 3 June 2003Despicable Deception The sale of post-sale maintenance contracts is a seedy business. Dixons, as one of the UK's seediest companies, has made untold £-millions from this shady practice. It consists of persuading unwary customers to pay for "cover" which they already enjoy, as of right... The strategy starts by exploiting the endemic ignorance of the shopper. For every purchase carries with it, automatically as a matter of law, the right to seek a legal remedy for any defect - and that right remains open for exercise for a period of six years from the date of the purchase. As time passes, it naturally becomes more and more difficult to identify a "defect", because all the features of regular use and abuse creep in to complicate the issues. But if a product is at any stage, within those first six years, shown to be defective, then the original supplier must either put it right or pay damages in respect of the consequences of the defect. A defect, remember, is something that was wrong with the product upon delivery: if the problem is caused by wear-and-tear, no such claim arises. The trouble is that "not many people know that". They are fobbed off with spurious "one-year" or "two-year" guarantees, which purport to offer compensation for "defective parts" without charge to the customer - when the only effect is to bluff the customer into believing that his rights only last one or two years, when in law they last for six years! This has always been one of the seediest of UK commercial practices, minimising consumer protection and maximising commercial profits. But Dixons and the warranty merchants go further. They say -
This is a simple, seductive, though misleading sales-pitch. True, the
"cover" does sometimes go further than the common law remedy for defect.
Some firms have even offered insurance cover against
all problems, whether caused by defect or not - and
that is a contract worth having!
What is your experience of the great maintenance-contract con? Drop me a line
3 June 2003 Trapped Like every barrister, Tony Blair takes legal arguments very seriously. It's an intellectual posture. It comes with the territory, as I well know - I worry myself to death, over quite minor possible infractions, which most people would not even notice. George Bush knows no such professional or personal inhibitions. And that explains much of the "distance" now emerging between the the US and the UK. At one level, I agree with Hugo Young, writing in The Guardian. He dismisses the present debate as mere sophistry, and traces the problem back to a personal commitment made by Blair "to the American cause" sometime in mid-2002 - a visceral, impassioned, unambiguous sense of commitment and destiny. I agree with that - and if you have not read the Young thesis, do so right now. But it is also important to trace the awful legal undergrowth into which Blair QC wandered, once that personal commitment had been made. He knew where his journey had to end - in war, if America wanted war, at Bush's side. The only question was -
He had three options. : to secure a new UN Security Council resolution, clearly authorising an attack upon Iraq - this was the neatest, tidiest path, and he lobbied enthusiastically to get it - but as the months wore on, it became ever clearer that he would fail. B : to persuade the British (at least the House of Commons) that no UN Resolution was necessary, because Saddam posed an "imminent threat" to the UK, and that he was therefore justified in launching a preemptive attack, by "common international law", according to a principle that has never been abrogated by international treaty.C : to argue that the UN had already approved an attack, for the purpose of disarming Saddam, way back in 1991, at the time of the Kuwait War and that authority was still "live".Now - these alternatives were mutually inconsistent with each other, and that made Blair's life complicated. But lawyers never worry about such matters. Indeed, it is that insouciance that has triggered the subsequent complications - because inconsistency of argument, while no legal flaw, is a crippling political weakness. Nobody really believed "C". Everyone agreed that "A" was best. But as the lobbying for "A" ran into the ground, Blair turned to "B". In proving the presence of an "imminent threat", he was forced to allege the presence of "weapons of mass destruction" (particularly portable chemicals). The argument demanded that allegation - for however else could Saddam have reached London? In that context, the Commons threat of a 45-minute countdown period for attack (on the UK, for that is all that mattered) represented the high-point of his advocacy, putting his full authority on the line - he was pulling out all the stops to create the aura of an imminent threat to the UK.
Blair is now engaged upon the impossible task of justifying himself within the framework of "B"-type arguments which - in the event - proved legally unnecessary. It is the formality of his own legal mind, and his remarkable ability to generate self-righteous "commitment" to whichever cause he chooses, that are proving his undoing. His very virtues are making the case for the political prosecution. I think that is called poetic justice.
What do you think? Drop me a line
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