Zak Thomas-Akoo argues that when it comes to gambling sector reform, faith alone isn’t enough.
One of the foundational protestant doctrines is called sola fide, or faith alone. It refers to the idea that sinners are forgiven and declared righteous solely through their love of Jesus Christ, entirely apart from their own actions. Some have noted the British radical tradition, from John Ball to Karl Marx, contains a strong protestant streak (or perhaps proto-protestant in the former case).
Gambling reform activism is itself often a Christian pursuit. Sir Iain Duncan Smith’s campaigning against the sector is perhaps informed by his devout Catholicism. Personally, I found it moving to hear one activist – who I’ll leave unnamed – discuss how his Christian background informed his sincere push for a better, more ethical gambling sector. Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong even with advocating for gambling to be banned outright; when you get down to it, it’s a question of values. For those whose campaigning against the sector comes from the left, there too is a proselytising, low-church style.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever publicly said this, but growing up I was immensely impressed by the gambling reform campaigners. Someone bought me a copy of Rob Davies’ Jackpot when it first came out, and I still remember flicking through The Guardian in my late teens reading his scoops, stories which gave me the first heady sense that maybe I could be a writer too.
Say what you mean
The Social Market Foundation issued a report last week calling for Machine Game Duty on Category B machines to be doubled from 20% to 40%. This, it argued, would be done on a “polluter pays” principle of linking verticals with higher harms to higher tax brackets – an entirely sensible-sounding idea. Given the thinktank’s success in lobbying for increases to online gambling tax rates last year, and Prime Minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham’s well-known scepticism towards gambling, there’s good reason to think this policy could be one of those reached for to help shore up Britain’s finances in the November Budget.
At its low-key launch event in a small room of a Westminster PR agency, the policy’s impressive advocates – former Gordon Brown advisor Theo Bertram, ex-Royal Marine and Labour MP Alex Ballinger, and clinical psychiatrist Henrietta Bowden Jones OBE – presented the plan almost as a technical adjustment, a small bureaucratic change to make British gambling tax policy slightly more rational. Dotted among the great and the good of the reform movement were a few sheepish looking hacks from the trade rags; uniformly the scruffiest people in the room.
UK regulatory expert Dan Waugh has done the hard yards of digging into the report and its somewhat careless approach to the livelihoods of tens of thousands. Just to pick a couple of issues with the report: it treats the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) as settled fact, despite the statistics regulator saying it likely significantly overstates participation and harms, and it also includes a strange and rather basic error in comparing VAT to duty.
It also makes no mention of, and apparently has no interest in, the fact that such a change would make the majority of the UK land-based industry structurally loss-making. It bafflingly argues that it would have a net positive impact on employment; if I was likely to lose my job, I would be rather dubious of this. It manages to argue this while also simultaneously claiming players will be channelled online, which for the purposes of this report, is seen as the less harmful option.
On the black market, the report is arguably deceptive. It is always curious how charts included in documents like these always seem to leave out the examples that don’t fit the narrative (like the Netherlands, a straightforward story of increased taxes contributing to a plunging channelisation share and one where the regulator agrees with those basic facts).
It is a complex topic with many dynamic variables, but to argue there is no correlation at all between tax rates and the black market is downright anti-intellectual, especially if your stated goal is harm reduction. Somewhat off topic, but it reminds me of a LinkedIn post by one of the more prominent public health fanatics I saw this week, where he claimed that any talk of illegal gambling is “manufactured by industry to weaken resolve to regulate”.
This is laughable and must surely be considered as anti-scientific as climate change denialism at this point (any look cursory abroad will show that high channelisation rates are the exception, not the rule). Sometimes I wonder if the people sticking their fingers in their ears like this would be happy if gambling addiction spiked as long as the licensed industry was destroyed.
Waugh estimates that at the proposed 40% rate, 4,000 of 5,500 betting shops and 1,300 of 1,450 adult gaming centres (AGCs) would close. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost, and racing would be short £100m of levy and media rights money.
In terms of how to mitigate this economic catastrophe, the report suggests the industry could simply spend less on marketing and pay their executives less – ideas seemingly chosen less to actually balance the sums and more to make for a catchy soundbite. We don’t know exactly what would happen, but its perfectly plausible that such tax hikes would simultaneously lower tax takings, lead to increased harm and put a population the size of a small city out of work. It is awfully certain about uncertain things.
Waugh concluded: “Given how shoddy the report is, it is vital that key stakeholders dig deeper than the performative and emotive headlines to assess the detail. There they will find that weak analysis of disjointed and poorly understood evidence leads to a policy recommendation that would be disastrously counter-productive for the UK government…”
Rules for thee…
What rankles me isn’t that people think betting shops are eyesores or that gambling should be dramatically reduced. These are legitimate beliefs, and it is legitimate to believe that the harms caused by the sector are not worth the employment or tax take – not least from those who have suffered harm. As I say, it’s a question of values.
What annoys me is the dishonesty in pretending to be a technocratic fix as opposed to the end of the British gambling sector as we know it, the sloppy way it has gone about making its arguments, as well as refusing to engage with the realities and trade offs of gambling policy in the 2020s. When dealing with people’s livelihoods and therefore their lives, is it too much to ask for basic competence? Faith alone isn’t enough.
I sometimes wish Bertram et al. were as interested in the rolling crisis that has impacted the UK gambling harms system over the past 18 months. With GambleAware’s transitionary funding proving totally inadequate, the statutory levy roll-out – in theory more money than ever before – has been a garbled mess, a scandal that would see those responsible resigning in any just world.
By the SMF’s own model, the tax changes would reduce the total raised by the levy by £1.2m. Waugh tells me he calculates this reduction to be more like £4.5m, on top of an estimated £5.5m fall from last year’s tax hikes. If, like their proponents argue, the measures reduce harms, then this could be justifiable. If not, it becomes a much harder sell.
At iGB Live last week – which in a typically puritanical move OHID has apparently warned levy-funded charities not to attend – harms professionals with lived experience spoke in moving terms about the damage that has been wrought. The school years of children without gambling education, the sports professionals who ruined their careers after not receiving training. Treatment has also clearly suffered due to the completely unnecessary funding shortfall, but we’ll probably never know the full extent of it.
As a hack from a trade rag, I don’t have the platform or access to the corridors of power that Bertram and Ballinger do. MPs probably don’t read my articles. But my reporting on the levy over the last few months might be the work I am most proud of in my career. The astonishingly poisonous fights over levy money are also perhaps where I lost my faith.
There are those who have argued that by virtue of having worked at an affiliate in the past, BetBlocker’s Duncan Garvie is so compromised that it should disqualify his organisation from receiving OHID grants. And yet, it’s hardly a secret that large chunks of the money that is being used to campaign against the sector were also made in gambling. But, you see, that’s fine. Stewart Kenny – the bookie who changed his mind – also made vast amounts of dosh from gambling before presumably switching it out for more ESG friendly shares. His well-reported philanthropy aside, is he giving the rest of it back? Or is what he believes the important thing, more than his past or where he made his money? Sola fide.
Of course, the gambling industry is also full of enormous pulsating hypocrites. Will Prochaska’s recent broadside highlighting B2Bs that work in the black market is effective because it’s clearly true. The UKGC’s Tim Miller literally gestured broadly to the black market operators chilling without issue at iGB Live while talking to my colleague Rory Calland last week. However, anyone who’s spoken to the critics will know they have a view of the Betting & Gaming Council (BGC) as a kind of sin eater, personified by its former leader Michael Dugher, whose insulting and offensive language towards them did no favours. With that said, a sense of the BGC as a mighty foe to be vanquished is perhaps a little out of proportion to its reality as a somewhat ineffectual trade association.
On that front, the BGC – stung from their previous defeats on gambling tax hikes and stake reductions – is said to be taking things more seriously this time around. People in the know say that Dugher’s blasé assurances and claims of a direct line to Rachel Reeves ahead of the Budget, paired with the surprising severity of the eventual tax hikes, was what did him in the end. Last week, there was a Category A meeting of the Big 5 operators to discuss their battle plans.
Will they do better this time? O ye of little faith…
