AS A vision of hell, the Government’s new Gambling Bill takes some beating. If Tessa Jowell’s proposals become law, a rash of new casinos, Las Vegas-style, will spread across the face of our major towns and resorts. They will be big, brash and extraordinarily addictive. We are already a nation of incipient gamblers, but now the urge is to be given full rein. Restrictions on fruit machines are to be removed in these new “super-casinos”, allowing jackpots of up to £1 million and as many tables for roulette, poker and blackjack as they can accommodate.
Already, there are applications from US companies to build giant casinos in Glasgow, Manchester, Salford and Sheffield. In Blackpool there could be as many as five. In the name of job creation, Edinburgh is considering a £5 million casino complex on the waterfront at Leith. The small, discreet gambling joints that have been around the city for as long as I can remember will be swept aside by vast gaming palaces with serried ranks of slot machines, where semiconscious punters can pull levers and lose their money all the livelong day.
Where does this mad drive to cater for all our worst instincts come from? Our city centres are already no-go areas thanks to the proliferation of pubs and clubs, with their happy hours and bottomless pitchers. Yet the Government, while affecting to wring its hands at the spread of binge-drinking, is content to waive the very regulations that might curb it.
The police are no longer allowed to object to the opening of new licensed premises on the ground that there is no “need” for them. At the same time, magistrates have been warned that if they continue to use “need” as a ground for refusing licenses, they will be deprived of the right to grant them. The result is a free for all, with more and more pubs competing to fill more and more customers with ever cheaper and more lethal quantities of alcohol.
All this is being encouraged in the name of “continental-style” drinking — the half-baked notion that if access to alcohol is freely available round the clock then people will no longer have to drink themselves senseless by closing time. In fact, what happens, as even the most gullible Home Office researcher would have to concede, is yet more mayhem in our city centres.
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Instead of pausing to wonder whether it is sensible to follow one disastrous social experiment with yet another, here they go again. You only have to walk through any Las Vegas casino to see the results of deregulated gaming — the crime it attracts, the Mafia syndicates that move in, the corruption it encourages. You would think that a British Government would move heaven and earth to prevent the same thing happening here. Yet Ms Jowell, the Culture Secretary, is happy to announce her new Bill, posing happily beside a roulette table, placing her chips on a single number (28, so far as I could see — always a bad bet), and encouraging us all to take to the tables.
Of course, some suitable safeguards are built in: fruit machines in places accessible to children will be outlawed; the number of million-pound jackpots will be limited; a regulating body is to be created; the casino operators will have to invest in other “leisure facilities” if they are to win licences. But Ms Jowell’s reasons for opening the floodgates are baffling. “Britain has one of the lowest rates of problem gambling in the modern world,” she says.
“This is at risk if we do not act now to bring our laws up to date.” This is an oxymoron. Britain’s problem gambling will be hugely increased by her proposals — as will the profits of the gaming companies.
There might be some justification for relaxing our drink and gambling laws if society were in a clearly stable and self-disciplined state. In fact, it has rarely seemed more dysfunctional. Yet the Government chooses this moment to suggest that we should throw away our remaining inhibitions, and party on. Where is the moral sense in that? And what does the Prime Minister have to say about it?
Tony Blair claims to be driven by moral convictions when he goes to war abroad, yet at home he chooses to abandon them, behaving more like a wayward New Age parent, leaving the kids with the key to the drinks cupboard and vague instructions not to overdo it. No wonder they’re out of control.
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Britain is no more suitable a test-bed for US-style gambling laws than it is for continental-style opening hours. Perhaps, however, Mr Blair has not managed to spend enough time at home recently to appreciate that.
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