It's Not Just the Archbishop

It appears to be the General Synod that is seriously confused as well.

The Church of England condemned the Government’s liberalisation of the gambling laws yesterday, blaming it for a tenfold increase in spending on gaming. The Church called for a statutory levy on the industry to pay for education and treatment of gambling addicts.

The General Synod, meeting at Church House, Westminster, passed a resolution stating it was “gravely concerned” that expenditure on gaming had risen from £4 billion to £40 billion over four years.

There is no way that spending upon gambling has risen from £4 billion to £40 billion in four years. Not the proverbial celluloid rat's chance in Hell.

They're confusing two different numbers there. The first number, £4 billion, looks like the total drop....the amount that gamblers actually lose. The second is the number that is actually wagered. And as not everything that is wagered is in fact the losses we shouldn't be comparing the two numbers.

As ever, we can track this confusion back to the fact that the people at The Guardian are innumerate. Polly Toynbee's made the claim that gambling is a £50 billion a year problem, meaning the amount wagered, while, oooh, say, Christopher Harvie has managed to confuse that with the amount lost.

I had another go at The G's statistics on this at my own blog, when they were talking about the rise in the amount wagered. They'd noted that the amount lost had risen by 50% in the last decade...but, umm, they didn't adjust for either inflation or rising wages. Very roughly, the amount lost has increased in line with the rise in earnings: when people earned £100 a week they were happy to lose £1 (as an example) for the fun of it, when they earn £150 a week they're happy to lose £1.50. Not exactly the most horrifying of findings.

It used to be said that the Church of England was the Tory Party at prayer. The General Synod now seems to be those who read The Guardian and, in something which I really don't think is an improvement, those deluded souls who actually believe what is written therein.