In defence of gambling

Doing good doesn’t always work out as expected. A regular entering his local pub takes pity on an old lady seemingly fishing with a bent stick and string in a kerbside pool of rain. He invites her in for a drink. As she raises her gin and Dubonnet, he asks amiably: ‘So how many did you catch today?’ ‘You’re the eighth,’ she replies.

Imagine another pub scene. As lockdown is relaxed, a customer’s order of three pints of bitter and two G&Ts is refused by the landlord: ‘Sorry, Squire, but according to my government boozometer that takes you over your permitted weekly Alcoholic Spending Limit of £100. You signed for two rounds on Sunday. Records also show two bottles of Prosecco at Pedro’s Wine Bar with a companion last Thursday (did your wife know about that?) and a six-pack of Heineken from Sainsbury’s for Arsenal’s last game on TV.’

With 7.5 million of Britain’s drinkers showing signs of alcohol dependency, and 358,000 estimated hospital admissions each year resulting from alcohol, some argue for legally imposed limits on alcoholic intake or spending. But no government would dare risk the kind of nanny-state furore that would follow attempted legislation to restrict what individuals spend on alcohol. Gambling, however, has become a politically fashionable target.

Having succeeded in persuading the government to cut the maximum stakes on betting-office machine bets from £100 to £2, MPs on the Gambling Related Harm All-Party Group are in full cry. The Gambling Commission they have labelled ‘unfit for purpose’ is examining plans for stakes limits on online bets and the introduction of ‘affordability checks’ on online punters. The government’s own gambling law review includes tougher restrictions on gambling advertising. We face the prospect of trying to put a fiver on a fancy in the 2.45