Yes, m’lud, an airline losing your luggage is awful – so is raising the issue in court
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Version 0 of 1. Picture the court room. You’re a high court judge sitting on a case worth billions of pounds and you have to step down from hearing the matter because you’ve lost your calm over some misplaced luggage. Not hundreds or thousands of items of misplaced luggage, not diamonds or live tissue for human transplant, but your own luggage, that you and your wife took on a recent city break. When Mr Justice Peter Smith sat in the high court on a case involving British Airways and demanded to know what had happened to his bags on a recent romantic trip to Florence, he had unusual powers that the rest of us do not possess. Injudiciously, he threatened to use them. Smith even entertained the idea of summoning British Airways’ chief executive to explain the mishap in a competition case heard at vast expense. The judge was finally invited to realise that his remarks left him completely unsuited to hearing the case. We all lose our perspective over our mistreatment by airlines but this incident was one of judicial arrogance and pomposity. Related: Computer says ‘no’ every time I try to make a claim with BA If Franz Kafka were writing today, he would undoubtedly select the workings of air companies for dystopian literary treatment. Only this year I’ve had easyJet swap aircraft for a flight to Berlin, bumping dozens of passengers including me on to the next day’s service, and I’ve had British Airways staff mislead me about the status of a flight to Amsterdam, after refusing to let me board it when it was right in front of me with the doors still open. There is no hell quite like being messed around by an airline. Funnily enough, there appears to be no more opaque a system in which individuals appear to hold absolute power, except perhaps for the courts. For British Airways and their legal team, the horror of being held to account for some missing bags during a multibillion pound piece of litigation must have been both stunning and excruciating. Judges around the country hear cases involving businesses and organisations with which they have some connection. While we might wish that they could, magistrates hearing proceedings for non-payment of the TV licence fee cannot refuse to punish individuals on the grounds that Mrs Brown’s Boys is dross. Judges hearing cases brought by energy suppliers, fast food companies and supermarkets cannot and should not use the hearing as a vehicle to pursue their own consumer grievances. Were judges to introduce their personal vendettas, Yodel, Abellio Greater Anglia and Ryanair would not find a fair hearing anywhere in the land. The temptation to abuse a position of professional privilege is an obvious one. Careful readers and PR agencies might raise my third paragraph rant at this moment, but I am not a judge. I am a lowly scribe, whose opinion of these companies is likely to alter upon receipt of – let’s say – a free holiday. I am not hearing a dispute worth several billions which requires me to be dispassionate. Like Smith, I have a bone to pick with most companies. I expect many regular passengers will have experienced a mishap at one point or another but with the passage of time they tend not to fixate us enough to derail the execution of our work. After his bags were safely returned to him he raised the issue a full 33 times with counsel for the airline It isn’t that Smith briefly lost his temper with British Airways but that after his bags were safely returned to him he raised the issue a full 33 times with counsel for the airline. That would count as obnoxious behaviour from anyone in any context but from a judge sitting on a case it is completely inexcusable. Nothing that has been raised 33 times, however compelling or interesting it might have been the first time, was worth repeating 32 times, just to drive the point home. Thirty three references to the same issue is unnecessarily repetitious. To give you some insight into just how tedious and obnoxious that would be, I’ve just made the point a few times and by now I’m certain you want to slap me. Perhaps the robes have gone to Smith’s head. Maybe the world would be a better place if he’d lost his wig and gown on that flight, or had fallen so in love with Florence that he just stayed there. It’s a lovely city and I’m sure for all the bother, cost and adverse publicity that they have caused him, British Airways would stump for the cost of a one-way flight. |