My own relationship with the gambling industry is almost entirely framed by horse-racing. If I’m at a race, I’ll put a couple of quid each way on a horse I like the look of with a bookie. If I’m absent from the event, I’ll go for an Irish trainer and a name I like. My family had a weakness for betting on races; my grandmother spent happy hours studying form, and my grandfather had his own stool in the betting shop. As an activity, this does have the possibility you can lose your shirt – and lots of people did and do. But it’s a world – a whole world – away from contemporary joyless gambling on fixed-odds betting terminals, where the scope for human skill and insight is precisely zero. You can never, ever, beat the system.
Have you read that brilliant, world-view changing book by Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond your Head? You should. The chapter on fixed-odds betting terminals in Las Vegas is sufficient in itself to put you off any notion that this kind of gambling has any glamour about it. You have poor benighted addicts so crazed with the notion that they can somehow beat the system that they have to wear nappies at the terminals to avoid having to go to the loo and somehow miss the one chance to change their luck. But they never can. This is not Fifties-style gambling like James Bond playing vingt-un in Monte Carlo in a dinner suit; that did involve an element of intelligent calculation, of skill. This doesn’t.
The government’s limited and belated white paper on gambling last week is, in itself, just a way of attempting to undo some of the predictable damage created by the Blair government’s disastrous liberalisation of gambling laws. That damage was predicted as well as predictable: see this piece before the event by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian. The current proposed reforms, especially the possible curbs on the stakes of young gamblers, are good so far as they go, but, as Iain Duncan Smith pointed out, they don’t go far enough.
As for the levy on the industry to fund ‘research’ on addiction, it’s just risible: we already know what harms gambling causes. We don’t need further proof. And what if the ‘research’ confirms existing findings about the disastrous social and familial effects of gambling, especially online gambling? What then? That cheery warning outside William Hill outlets to the effect that you should ‘gamble responsibly’; has anyone, ever, been put off imprudent betting by it?
Of course, there should be a ban on gambling advertisements; I was genuinely shocked last year during the World Cup when ads came on during one of the deciding matches on ITV offering the chances of betting on the outcome. As Labour’s Paul Blomfield MP has pointed out, viewers are exposed to up to 70 gambling advertisements during a match. We – well, other people, including the government – get on our collective high horse about marketing cigarettes, to the point where they have to be sold like contraband, but I can’t think of anyone who has committed suicide as a result of spending too much on cigarettes. There’s a limit to how much you can smoke.
But many people each year, almost all men – and many of them young men – do commit suicide as a result of losing everything they possess through gambling. Liz and Charles Richie’s son Jack committed suicide in 2017 at the age of 24, having become addicted to gambling aged 16 and betting on fixed odds betting terminals with his lunch money. Anyone complaining about the nanny state taking over our lives should contemplate this: a teenager is able to engage in the most dangerous form of gambling with his lunch money. Of course you want a nanny state to stop it. I would.
A 25-year old, Chris Bruney, committed suicide, also in 2017, after gambling away £119,000. Instead of closing his account, the bookies gave him cash bonuses and free bets. After his death, his grieving family found that an online casino had given him a £400 bonus to bet with hours before he took his life. Of all the necessary measures to tighten the rules on gambling, banning these perverse incentives to gamble more are the most needed.
Once you could have relied on the Methodist churches to lead the charge against gambling, and to do them justice, they are probably still on the case. And that was because, operating in working-class areas, they could see the damage it causes. Those Tories who are getting mildly worked up about the nanny state are mostly, I would bet (make it a fiver; live dangerously), not living in those areas. Because if you look, all too often, the more run down the locality, the greater the proportion of street space that is given over to betting shops. But that ignores the far greater number of outlets available online, where you can play all night and all day, and squander everything you’ve got, and your family has got, without any human being watching you.
Nanny state? Bring it on.
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