Britons Get Smarts on Gambing

The six out of seven Langley City councillors who voted for a big, new gambling casino had all the usual good reasons for doing so. To name just a few:

1. Everybody else is doing it;

2. It creates jobs;

3. The gambling company is going to build a nice hotel for us in the downtown center;

4. If we don’t accept it, some other less worthy community will get that hotel

5. People want to gamble, even those who haven’t thought about it until now;

6. As no less authority than the mayor Las Vegas has said, gambling is good for a city provided you can keep your own people away from the tables and cater to strangers from out of town, people who take their troubles away with them after their holiday for other welfare agencies to deal with;

7. Our provincial government, friend of the meek, succor of the weak, is going to take care of the problem gamblers by handing out leaflets urging them to put their extra dollars in bank savings accounts and collect a cent on the dollar with every year that passes. That should straighten them out. Anyway it will be only a few tens of thousand who lose their homes and go to divorce court.

8. Anyway, what’s all the fuss about? Everybody is doing it.

Against eight powerful arguments like these, the anti-gambling people are throwing snowballs in hell when they call gambling a gullibility tax, levied on the poor by the unscrupulous. The antis cannot prevail and they won’t prevail and the evidence of this is everywhere about us.

In 1992, Canadians paid $2.7 billions in the hope of beating the odds. By 2001, the last year of full records, they were spending $9 billions a year.

Yet in all this gloom and its frequent tragedies, a ray of light strikes through. Something very encouraging is happening in Great Britain.

The British were years ahead of us in the gullibility tax game. They have had their sports pools, their government lotteries and a dozen other forms of gambling for many decades. In the past year or two. during one of the most prosperous eras in British history, something strange happened. Gambling began to fade.

The football pools, which had 9 million players in 1996, have only 1.4 million lion now. Those taking part in newspaper lotteries have declined 36 per cent in six years. Greyhound race betting is down so much that the sport itself is threatened with terminal disinterest. The number of bookmakers has declined from 10,200 in 1996 to 8,700, a fifteen per cent drop. A few forms of gambling have increased, but only, say some, because the government offered tax relief to the industry in order to save it.

This seems to be the reverse of the Canadian experience. Why?

One answer is provided by Leo McKinstry, writing in the April 5 issue of The Spectator of London. “The lottery has undermined gambling in this country but in a far more sophisticated way than is usually suggested. What the Lottery has really achieved has been to educate us--far more effectively than any sermonizing cleric or addiction therapist--about the foolishness of gambling. It has shown us the absurdity of thinking that we can beat the odds.”

In short, common sense is raising is homely face in Britain, frustrating the best-laid government plans for easy plucking of the citizen taxpayer.

The British government, says Mr. McKinstry, is now planning to lure the suckers back to the tables with new legislation which relaxes the rules for casino memberships, permits for live music and alcohol in betting shops and unlimited payouts by the one-armed bandits. But, even playing with its own marked deck, the government in London may find that the days of easy earnings from the gamblers are past in that country.

One by one, it seems, the Brits have perceived that there is no free lunch; they have come to realize that none of the people who run gambling establishments are in the business for philanthropic reasons. It’s a harsh thing to say, but it is true: all they want us for is our money.

Perhaps, with the aid of time, which heals so many ailments, we may repeated the British experience in this country a few years down the yellow brick road.

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July, 03