A one-man anti-gambling torpedo

The Financial Times published an interview with Derek Webb recently. Webb is the multi-millionaire inventor of Three Card Poker who has put a small fortune into the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, an organisation he formed to attack fixed-odds betting terminals in betting shops.

He clearly feels that he has the wind in his sails because he's eyeing up his next target...

He adds he may broaden CFG’s focus to target online gambling next. “I want to fight where I can win,” says Mr Webb.

I'm told that he expressed a similar intention to go after the internet next at the Conservative conference last week.

Webb's growing addiction to attacking non-casino gambling sectors will come as no surprise to students of the slippery slope, but few people seem to understand just what a whirlwind of destruction he is unleashing.

Webb wants to reduce the stake on FOBTs to £2, knowing that this will make the machines unplayable for most punters. This will likely mean the end of FOBTs in bookies in Britain.

And that will mean the end of many bookies. FOBTs contribute around half of the average betting shop's revenue. They have no way of making that money from sports betting, which has largely gone online. If they lose half their revenue, there will be thousands of closures. The Association of British Bookmakers says 92 per cent of betting shops are at risk. Nobody knows how many, but it is not unlikely that most would go.

And that has severe repercussions for the horse-racing industry. Under a system set up in the 1960s, horse-racing gets 10.75 per cent of the profits from bets placed on races in bookmakers. This amounts to a subsidy of £60 million per annum but it will be much less if bookmakers go out of business.

As Lawrence Robinson, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Racing & Bloodstock, says:

If FOBTs go, bookmakers’ shops will go, and racing will lose out. 

The government has recently extended the levy to online betting, but online operators do not necessarily pay tax in Britain (to put it mildly) and it remains to be seen how many people bet on horse-racing without betting shops acting as its high street shop window. Horse-racing has been in decline for decades. This could be the final nail in the coffin for some racecourses.  

But it doesn't end there. If FOBTs go, the government will lose £400 million per annum in gambling revenue. To claw it back, the Chancellor is reported to be looking at taxing casinos more.

Formal proposals to be circulated among senior ministers to increase taxes on casinos, sources say.

That would put casinos under added financial pressure to go alongside all their other problems (as with FOBTs, casinos can't pass the costs onto customers via their table games because the odds are fixed).

And now Webb is going to go after online gambling too! From top to bottom, Britain's gambling industry is going to suffer more from one millionaire with a bee in his bonnet than from all the religious campaigners and moral guardians put together.