Vol. 27 No. 5 · 3 March 2005
pages 16-17 | 3502 words
Perhaps a Merlot
Ross McKibbin
- Regulating Commercial Gambling: Past, Present and Future by David Miers
Oxford, 588 pp, £70.00, September 2004, ISBN 0 19 825672 8
Hardly any aspect of British life has combined religion, class, ideology, politics and law more potently than attitudes to gambling – not even attitudes to drink and sex. That is because, as with drink and sex, two strong impulses have contended. On the one hand, the majority of British people have always liked to gamble; on the other, a smaller number, who have had privileged access to political elites, have sought to stop gambling – usually on a priori moral grounds. Those who dislike gambling have normally felt more strongly than those who like it; their passion has made up for their paucity of numbers. The state has tried to please both majority and minority and typically has pleased neither. It has passed much prohibitory legislation – conspicuously the Street Betting Act of 1906, which attempted to ban off-course betting on horses – but has been very reluctant to enforce it, particularly if, as in the case of the Street Betting Act, legislation seemed to favour the non-working class against the working class. One result of this tension is that the whole apparatus of modern mass gambling largely originated in an activity – street betting – which was until 1961 formally illegal.
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Letters
Vol. 27 No. 7 · 31 March 2005
From Valerie Yule
I find Ross McKibbin’s remarks on gambling in Australia inadequate (LRB, 3 March). The country itself is a gamble: its existence displays the human inclination to take risks, to attempt new ventures, to explore. But it’s a far cry from these healthy forms of gambling when hundreds of thousands of people spend solitary hours at pokies – fruit machines. The money spent is ill-afforded (most Australian households are in debt), and the profits that go to big proprietors and the few winners far outweigh those that go to clubs. Gamblers in Victoria alone lose over $4 billion a year, and that in a state of five million people. The working classes lose most because they see no other means to economic mobility, and have few if any other legal ways to experience the excitements of risk-taking. State governments now rely on this form of taxing the poor to avoid raising taxes on the rich; meanwhile, programmes for problem gamblers provide livelihoods for the middle class.
Valerie Yule
Mount Waverley, Australia
Vol. 27 No. 8 · 21 April 2005
From Oliver Streets
Ross McKibbin is right to say that the Gambling Bill deals primarily with gaming and not with betting, but he doesn’t explain why (LRB, 3 March). The reason, I believe, is that betting is changing radically in a way that will severely restrict the revenue the government can extract from it. The catalyst for this change is the internet. Few services are better suited to virtual delivery than betting: the only things that change hands are money and information and both can be easily exchanged electronically. Better still, the traditional bookmaker (and his margin) can be bypassed. That is why betting exchanges will continue to grow at the expense of high street bookmakers, with their high overheads and fat profit margins. Virtual exchanges can operate from any jurisdiction, so it is hard to tax them too aggressively in case they move offshore. By encouraging super casinos (although only one is now planned, rather than the eight originally envisaged), the government was hoping to keep as big a portion as possible of the gambling pound where it could be readily taxed. Its proposed legislation is a near-naked attempt at revenue protection: talk of ‘modernisation’ merely dresses it up.
Oliver Streets
Frant, Kent
