An epic crime dressed up as choice

An epic crime dressed up as choice. A war is being waged on Britain’s most impoverished and vulnerable communities and its front line is the high street betting shop. Warfare is invariably the struggle for material resources when business negotiations break down and it is typically waged by the powerful against the weak; whilst it is normally carried out using conventional weaponry the economic war that is raging across the country at the moment uses a modern tool of mass destruction, the fixed odds betting terminal. A report to be published by Campaign for Fairer Gambling in parliament next week, but released to the national press today, has estimated that some £13 billion has been extracted by bookmakers from the most impoverished communities across England. So far there is no data for Wales and Scotland but it is unlikely to be any better given the explosion of high street book makers in all parts of the UK. The gambling industry likes to present gambling as a bit of harmless fun, a traditional pastime that dates back centuries, after all who hasn’t bet a pound on the Grand National, played a fruit machine in a pub or bought a lottery ticket? As with the drinks industry, pseudo-libertarian notions of resisting the nanny state and giving people the right to do what they want with their own money are trotted out whenever the possibility of legislation that might affect profits is mentioned; the punters are rational economic agents, making clear choices about what to spend, save and gamble, introducing the idea of compulsion and addiction ruins this rosy picture. This sanitised view of modern gambling is a fantasy for many, and the occasional punter that places a bet once or twice a year is of no interest at all to the gaming lobby, their favourite client is the vulnerable addict. The current explosion of betting shops on the high streets of Britain results from Labour’s Gambling Act in 2005, which relaxed the rules on how many gambling establishments there could be in any given area. The result, as with Labour’s introduction of 24 hour drinking, has been a catastrophe. In one instance the report showed that £118 million had been poured into just 570 machines in Liverpool, leading to a £23 million loss for the ‘customer’; little wonder that they are described as the crack cocaine of gambling. The current government’s mantra of solidarity, that we are ‘all in this together’ could not be further from the truth, the gaming lobby has as powerful hold over David Cameron as the alcohol lobby does. Far from being united by the adverse times in which we live and the struggles of the recession, the reality that has been exposed in this new report is that during this financial crisis there are winners and losers and the latter have become prey. The massive epidemic of gambling addiction in Britain, existing in symbiosis with crippling pay-day lending, has been deliberately ignored for years but the past decade of governmental irresponsibility has allowed the problem to grow until it is unavoidable. It is impossible for the government and the industry to argue convincingly that problem gambling is an issue for a tiny fraction of the betting community. Once that convenient narrative falls apart, the industry’s deliberate onslaught against the poorest in the country will no doubt continue, but without the veneer of legitimacy that all wars need.