Are the British government betting restrictions on the money?
By Rolf Johnson
I’m jumping the gun. The Government’s Gambling Review might publish its findings on 17 April but as deadlines for its publication have come and gone over three yawning years, I don’t think there’s need to hold one’s breath long enough to asphyxiate oneself.
The delay has nothing to do, we are assured, with the £378,000 that fifty-seven Members of Parliament have received since the last election in hospitality, gifts, donations and wages from bookmakers. The integrity of that largesse has been “checked” though whether as rigorously as it is intended the public’s betting habits are going to be, we’ll have to be patient – until April 17 at least.
Theatre audiences continue to attend playwright Samuel Beckett’s 1981 masterpiece ‘Waiting for Godot’ whose message is that repeated nonsensical actions demonstrate man’s inability to give meaning to life. Heavy stuff: but the Gambling Commission has threatened to recommend restrictions on betting such that would kill racing in Britain. How nonsensical is that?
Whether or not you agree with the premise that gambling is a social evil the fact is the finance model for British racing is based on taxing bookmakers and distributing the proceeds for the benefit of the sport, through the Horserace Betting Levy Board (HBLB).
Scaremongering about the future? Indian audiences will recognise the symptoms, oppressive Government taxes that led to an epidemic of illegal betting. In Britain the opportunities to lose your money legally, and swiftly, are legion. If, as is mooted, betting here is to be curtailed by “affordability checks” aimed to ensure punters don’t lose more than they can afford, then betting on horseracing will go underground and the money the Levy Board collects to keep the game afloat will be lost. India is the exemplar: the damage that governments do when they dabble in matters horseracing is less important than votes – and the racing world can protest all it likes, there just aren’t enough votes in the game.
Stewart Kenny, founder of iconic bookmakers Paddy Power, quit his firm because he saw the harm unregulated universal freedom to bet was doing. Kenny invoked the urban myth that if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it will instantly leap out. But if you put the amphibian in a pot filled with tepid water which you gradually heat, it will remain in the water until it boils to death. The message is neither the frog, nor the problem gambler, can decide when to jump - until both are in too deep and the water scalding.
In 2019, as a sop, the Government set up a ‘self-exclusion helpline’. There’s a phone number to ring to cancel yourself from betting: the message is “Know when to Stop” – which is just what destitute punters, and frogs, grasp all too late.
“Safeguards” is the buzz word. In my area, the North of England, we say about miscgenated artefacts that they were “as much use as chocolate fireguards” (or teapots). Safeguards are intended to save people from themselves – from walking into the betting shop with money and ambition – and walking out without either.
Betting shops were infamous as ‘a licence to print money’ - for their proprietors. Betting shops were made legal in 1961, peaked at 16,000, and are down to just over six thousand today. Sitting, comfortably or otherwise, anywhere anytime you can now bet online, anywhere in the world. Once ‘having a touch’ meant you’d had a juicy winner. Now touch simply means tapping your phone screen and placing your bet.
Bookmaking at day-to-day race meetings is dying: in case it does in India I have kept tickets, losing of course, from visits to Mahalaxmi, Guindy and Hastings. (Mahmood Associates and Madhav & Co).
In the old days you could run up a ‘tab’ behind the bar of your local pub or club though not of the order of the ones you can run up with your bookmaker - until settlement day which could involve your previously obliging bookie “sending the boys round” to collect what was owing. Short of someone ‘coming round’ to confiscate your mobile phone, the anti-gambling brigade will have to destroy democracy to prevent punters dodging “affordability checks”.
The £19.2m record fine the William Hill organization has just been clobbered with for “failing to safeguard bettors” and the more sinister charge of “money laundering irregularities” has made all the headlines. The name of bookmaker William Hill, who died in 1971, still resonates throughout British racing though the firm has gone through many guises since his death. Singlehandedly he made bookmaking respectable. His successors have, with their seductive inducements to gamble - “just a bit of fun” - advertised by well-groomed, well-reimbursed celebrities – have undermined that aura of respectability.
For William Hill betting was a serious business based on study allied with accumulated knowledge. In theory with two dedicated TV racing stations and a daily trade paper the Racing Post (£4.90! Rs 490) plus innumerable online racing platforms, punters are better informed than ever. Yet still it is bookmakers who stay ahead of the game.
In Hill’s day criminality in the betting world was certainly rife – often under police ‘protection’. But he cleaned up the business (and ‘cleaned up’ financially). “Hill No Limit” – the amount you could bet and win with him was his watchword. Now there is insistence from many sides that there must be a limit to the amount you can lose and the bookmaking fraternity may be obliged, by law, to curtail punter’s losses (unsafe amounts). They’ve long been united in camouflaging the fact they disqualify punters who win ‘unsafe amounts’.
Last year Ladbrokes had a fine only £2m less than Hills but still trousered massive eight figure profits: Bet365’s owner Denise Coates put £213.4m in earnings and bonuses in her handbag. Fines for transgressing new rules will be paid out of petty cash (oh, and stacking the odds against punters even higher).
It is hardly a coincidence that when fines are meted out the defence is always “The failings happened under previous ownership”. Ladbrokes were taken over by Entain; William Hill by 888 which paid £1.95 billion to acquire the premier firm’s name in 2022. Bet365 sponsor Stoke City Football Club. You can bet on Stoke’s matches; they are currently mid division in the Championship – which is sponsored by Skybet.
In the old days, pre-betting shops, we kids were sent with dad’s bet wrapped round a half-crown coin (which looked uncommonly like a rupee) down to bookie’s runner behind the barber’s shop. In even older days the ‘runners’ were hand-picked to outrun ‘rozzers’ (the police). Bigger bookmakers would pay the police to ‘slow down’ or give advance notice of raids by their men - all related in the biography, ‘William Hill the Man and the Business’.
The greatest gamblers have been brought down as their judgements become less acute, the brain slowing as grey cells atrophy. An expert, a colleague at Timeform, could tell you where every horse in every race in the season’s Form Book had finished. The fixture list was bit shorter then. He ended up driving a taxi.
Lurid stories of punters losing home and family through gambling addiction fuels the calls for restrictions on individuals running their own lives. The contemporary equivalent of ‘sending the boys round’ to collect punters losses is the Government sending us a ‘White Paper’ to restrict problem gambling by deep intrusion in our lives. Another classic work of literature, George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984’ in which the State takes total control of lives, contains the phrase, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the future.” Lifelong punters are walking away from racing’s future. Further dictation by Governments ostensibly seeking to ‘protect’ people from their gambling follies, will see Orwell’s tyranny come to pass.
Long standing bettors are congenitally secretive about winnings, and losses. We’ve all been guilty of the phrase “Oh I broke about even” when we’d done nothing of the sort. Henceforward we are going to be obliged to reveal personal financial information which could circulate in wider circles than mere betting.
The stakes could not be higher for the racing industry, whose annual income from betting via the levy and media rights was estimated, pre-Covid, at £262 million in 2019.
Last year the Betting and Gaming Commission published figures claiming that the number of customers using unlicensed betting websites has doubled to over 400,000 in two years, while the money staked with unlicensed operators – money lost to the betting and racing system – had doubled to £2.8bn.
Until the Review is published, all bets are off.
The serious betting season always started with the first day of the turf at the beginning of April at Doncaster, with the Lincoln Handicap. A big field, of twenty plus runners – the record was 58 in 1948! – ensures the race is often sponsored by bookmakers anticipating a ’result’ (for their coffers).
And yet in 2023 none of the top riders who will fight out the jockey’s title were at Doncaster. Oisin Murphy, back from suspension, and reigning champion William Buick rode winners at Kempton’s all-weather meeting, and Tom Marquand was in Australia. Former champion Ryan Moore was across the Channel in France and Frankie Dettori across the Atlantic in Santa Anita.
Judged by results they mostly made the right choices – but it was akin to Akhade Sandesh, Suraj Narredu and P S Chauhan and co choosing to ride at Ooty instead of a big day at Bangalore.
Our top jockeys do not start their title rivalry until May 6th, Two Thousand Guineas Day. The finish line for the championship ends a month before the turf flat season’s climax on November 11, back at Doncaster. There is, allegedly, a ‘simple’ explanation for these aberrations – but my mind is too simple to grasp it.
Murphy sat out 2022 banned for various heinous offences and champion apprentice Benoit de la Sayette also served a six months’ sentence for drug abuse. He too bounced back to win what race fans will always regard (whatever those who dream up the fixture list say) as the first big race of ‘the season’, the Lincoln, on top weight seven-year-old gelding Migration.
There were events of greater moment billed the next day at Leopardstown in Ireland - the beginning of the Coolmore charge, but it resembled more like that of the Light Brigade than blitzkrieg. Half the field for the Ballysax (Group 3) Stakes, a race Aidan O’Brien has won in the past with future Derby winners Galileo and High Chaparral, were Ballydoyle representatives. Mohawk Chief looked a make weight but his stablemates Alexandroupolis and Denmark, both Camelot colts, were first and second favourites. They’d been touted as Derby contenders after they won their maidens at Galway and Naas last season: they won few friends at Leopardstown - outsider of the field White Birch who has no big race entries trouncing the pair.
Before the Ballysax the monopoly of the 2000 and 1000 Guineas trials by O’Brien continued with Hans Andersen and Never Ending Story respectively. Mind you, neither was a Coolmore product being by Godolphin’s Dubawi and Juddmonte’s Frankel respectively – the two sires likely to battle out the stallion title – again.
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