The gambling white paper came out last week. It contains three headline reforms which I discuss in this article for The Critic. In the long term, the most significant of them will be the gambling leby because I strongly suspect that it will become a slush fund for activists.
The statutory levy will create an avalanche of cash for activist-academics at a time when gambling is being repositioned as a public health issue. Gambling research has always been a small academic niche. The only people itching to get into it are left-wing social scientists who cut their teeth in the wars on tobacco, alcohol and food and are looking for new dragons to slay. They don’t know anything about gambling and have little desire to learn. They will simply repurpose old anti-smoking regulation and temperance legislation and create the policy-based evidence to justify them.
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