Geoff Banks
Next Monday at Labour conference in Liverpool there is a fringe event titled What Next for Gambling Reform: Time for a New Act?
It runs at the Live Lounge in the M&S Bank Arena which presumably the person funding the whole bash has acquired at considerable cost.
The new Gambling Minister, Vicky Foxcroft, is on the panel. It will be her first substantial public outing on the brief, a few weeks into the job.
Look at who else is in the room. The chair is Dr James Noyes, Senior Fellow at the Social Market Foundation. The SMF’s gambling research programme is funded by Derek Webb. One of the two hosts is the Coalition to End Gambling Ads, whose director Will Prochaska also sits on the panel. Funded by Derek Webb. The other host is More in Common, the polling company whose surveys the Coalition cites when it claims the public supports an advertising ban. Alex Ballinger MP and Dawn Butler MP complete the lineup. A more dedicated group of prohibitionists it would be hard to find. It is dignified by this latest sham version of gambling ministers to make the pilgrimage
So who exactly is Derek Webb? Not a British public health expert. He is a casino entrepreneur who invented Three Card Poker, a high margin table game built for fast, repeated play. It remains one of the most profitable products on any casino floor. Webb sold out for a fortune and now pumps that casino money into Britain through a Beverly Hills company, funding think tanks, campaign groups and political parties to restrict how British punters spend their own money. He doesn’t believe you’re capable of managing how you spend your money
Webb gave over one million pounds to Labour before the last election. A man enriched by one of the fastest, highest margin gambling games ever devised is paying to lecture this country about the dangers of a bet on the 3.30 at Haydock. There is a word for that.
Now count the other side of Monday’s panel. No licensed operator. Nobody from racing, a sport that stands to lose hundreds of millions from the policies this panel will promote. Nobody who speaks for the millions of people who bet legally every week without harm. Not one seat. This is not a breach of any code. Ministers speak at fringe events all the time and there is no rule requiring balance on a conference panel. Ms Foxcroft is entitled to attend and let her derive discomfort from the atmosphere
Let’s not pretend it is a debate. Every organisation on that platform sits inside a single parochial funding network, glorifying in their 9wn effluence, and a new minister will receive her introduction to gambling policy entirely from one side of the argument. The record of that side deserves scrutiny. In 2020 Dr Noyes wrote the SMF paper proposing affordability checks at one hundred pounds a month. A pitiful £3 a day. Lose more than that and Noyes expected your bookmaker to demand payslips. He later retreated from the absurdity, but only after several years of damage
That thinking fed the checks which have driven high staking customers out of the regulated market, damaged racing’s finances and reduced problem gambling by not one measurable person. The Coalition’s statistics on gambling revenue have been publicly corrected by the outgoing chief executive of the Gambling Commission. These are the voices that will have the Minister’s undivided attention on Monday.
So here is the question I would put from the floor. Minister, who briefs you on the other side? What meetings are in your diary with the licensed industry, racecourses and the customers your policies will affect? And as a representative of a government claiming to desire growth – aren’t you in the wrong place? Or just simply in the wrong job
If the answer is none, your induction is not an education. It is a recruitment. My invitation stands. I run a licensed independent bookmaker. I will meet the Minister any day she chooses, and I will bring punters, not lobbyists. She should hear both sides before the first decision is taken, not after.
