The Guardian view on gambling

It looks like the Guardian has let its anti-gambling correspondent Rob Davies have a go at writing a leader.

 

The Guardian view on gambling: a public health approach is a good bet

The regulation of internet gambling was left out of the last government’s online harms bill. So far, Labour’s plans for the industry are opaque. But the industry’s rapid growth...

 

What growth? The industry only appears to have grown if you don't adjust for inflation. In 2014/15 (the first year for which we have comparable data), gambling spend in the UK was £13.5 billion. If this had kept pace with inflation, it would be £18.1 billion today. In fact, gambling spend last year was £15.1 billion. It has shrunk in real terms.

... coupled with growing concern about problem gambling in the UK and around the world, means ministers deserve to come under pressure if they don’t clarify their intentions soon. 

The sports minister Tracey Crouch resigned in 2018 when a pledge to cap the stakes on fixed-odds betting terminals was delayed. 

 

The idea that the government was delaying the cap was the last lie from the anti-FOBT people in a campaign full of lies. It was originally planned for April 2020 and was brought forward to October 2019. Crouch's dishonest stunt brought it forward by a further six months.

How did that cap on FOBTs go anyway? Weren't they the crack cocaine of gambling, responsible for hundreds of suicides a year? Shouldn't things be much better now they've disappeared? As far as I can see, the only tangible result has been the closure of lots of betting shops and the loss of thousands of jobs. As I predicted.

Six years on, proposals to cap the stakes on digital slot machines are up in the air, after last year’s white paper was shelved. Also on hold are the introduction of a statutory levy on businesses to pay for research and treatment, and the creation of an ombudsman.

 

It's that last bit that really concerns the pressure groups and the 'public health' quackademics. They were told there was a £50 million slush fund coming their way. They are getting impatient.

 

Arguably even more concerning is the lack of any clear direction on restricting gambling advertising, which has become ubiquitous in sport, and particularly football. Recent research showed that Premier League fans were bombarded with almost 30,000 advertisements on a single weekend, with half of clubs found to have promoted betting on webpages aimed at children.

 

The claim here is that fans of the Premier League saw an average of 30,000 gambling advertisements in a single weekend. Does that seem remotely plausible? The source of the claim is some 'research' by people at Bristol University who watched six televised football games in August, but instead of watching the football, they were looking for gambling 'messaging'. This included "static pitchside hoardings, electronic
pitchside hoardings (both full or part), clothing worn by supporters, the front of a player’s shirt, the sleeve
of a player’s shirt, integrated graphic, sponsorship lead-in, commercial advertisement break, interview
or press conference, stadium structure, and ‘other’ to capture anything else."

So not really advertisements, then. And far from being 'bombarded' by them, people would have seen them - if at all - in the corner of their eye. Every time a logo appeared somewhere on the screen, it was counted as a 'message'. And because they counted "the maximum number of logos per format that were visible during each individual camera shot", this added up to a very large number. They then added in coverage on TalkRadio, Sky Sports News and social media for good measure.

This is the kind of meaningless garbage academics want to spend millions of pounds on once they get their hands on the levy money.

In 2023 the Guardian banned all gambling advertising, because of the risks.

 

I'm sure that was a huge blow to the industry.

 

Meanwhile, the NHS has doubled the number of specialist clinics in England to 15.

 

That is a good thing. It will be interesting to see how busy they are. It's just a shame that taxpayers are paying for them now that the NHS has refused to use the industry's money.

 

Last week’s report from the Lancet medical journal grouped gambling with tobacco, alcohol and other “unhealthy commodity industries”, and argued convincingly that governments and regulators should strive for a common approach.

 

The Lancet report is a long document with remarkably little substance. 'Public health' academics want to get their hands of gambling, that much is clear, but they don't have much idea of what they're going to do with it when they do. Banning advertising is about their only concrete proposal. The other ideas that 'public health' chancers have come up with are demented and show their total ignorance of the industry and its customers.

 

Anti-gambling activists want gambling treated as a 'public health issue' because they think - correctly - that a 'public health approach' means incrementally banning things. But gambling is not a public health issue by any reasonable definition and there is nothing to be gained by having people who know nothing about it getting involved. 

 

This would include a recognition of corporate practices designed to influence both consumer behaviour and regulation – and a robust challenge to the industry’s preferred framing. This treats problem gambling, like other addictions and obesity, as the result of poor choices by individuals, rather than as the predictable result of an environment in which people are encouraged to adopt risky habits.

 

Problem gambling is a recognised psychological disorder and it cannot be dealt with unless it is understood as such. The 'public health' framing thinks it is all about tHe InDuStRy and that is why a 'public health approach' will never work. Paradoxically, treating problem gambling as a public health issue is antithetical to treating it as what it is: a (mental) health issue.

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