The turf | 1 March 2018

You can tell by the tone of the jokes how most occupations are regarded and we’ve all heard the traditional ones about the old enemy. ‘Why don’t sharks attack bookies?’ ‘Professional courtesy’. ‘Why did God invent bookmakers?’ ‘To make used-car salesmen look good.’ ‘Why are bookmakers buried an extra six feet down?’ ‘Because deep down they are very nice people.’

OK, such stories are applied to lawyers too. And journalists. But as a Racing Post headline confirmed last week, bookmakers are under heavy pressure. William Hill has been fined £6.2 million for breaching regulations on social responsibility and on money laundering. For example, it allowed a customer to deposit £541,000 over 14 months on the unprobed assumption that his income was £365,000 a year. In fact, he was earning £30,000 and was funding his habit by stealing from his employer.

The advertising watchdog the Committee of Advertising Practice has announced a crackdown on Bet Now! TV advertisements. The betting industry is panicking over the government’s planned reductions on the maximum amount that punters can stake on fixed-odds betting terminals (which could see the sum reduced from £100 to a mere £2) and there is growing alarm across all political parties about problem gambling. The Gambling Commission estimates that there are some 430,000 problem gamblers with another two million at risk. The charity GambleAware sees only 8,500 of these a year and its chief Kate Lampard complains that the state spends considerable amounts tackling the problems caused by drugs and alcohol but virtually nothing on those caused by gambling.

The problem for those of us who love racing is that the structures set up long ago made racing’s financing dependent on a levy taken from the profits derived from gambling.