GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO GAMBLE

GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO GAMBLE
Sunday July 29,2012  

By Jimmy Young

OUR GOVERNMENT is indulging in some strange and rather worrying behaviour.
After confidently announcing its plans, it stumbles, skids, slides, stops, pauses and then continues as though nothing had happened, performing tyre-smoking U-turns.

As though that were not bad enough, I now think it may have flipped its lid and gone completely doolally. At a time when there is economic chaos, confusion and signs of panic in the Eurozone and our own economy is not in the most robust of health, the Government is urging us to gamble.

I have never been much of a gambler but I well remember the euphemism used to conceal the real nature of gambling. When I phoned to place a bet the voice at the other end of the telephone said: “Thank you sir, £10 invested.”

I thought to myself: “No it isn’t. Putting £10 into your building society or your bank account is investing; betting £10 on a horse is gambling.”

If gambling spirals out of control, as tragically in the case of some addicts it does, the results can be catastrophic.

In 1974 I presented a programme for BBC Radio2 about gambling.

I interviewed a compulsive gambler who hoped that by revealing his desperate plight he would help people to understand how dangerous gambling can be.

He told us that he had lost three businesses plus £60,000 in cash through his addiction to gambling and he simply was not able to give it up. I do not know how much his three businesses were worth, but his cash loss alone would be in the region of £440,000 today.

He provided a stark example of the tragically ruinous effect of compulsive gambling.

So I am therefore surprised and shocked that a Conservative-led group of MPs is demanding that betting shops should be allowed to install many more fixed odds gaming machines than the four per shop limit allowed at present. Why?

The reply from the Commons culture, media and sport select committee is that the “reluctantly permissive” gambling legislation over the past 50 years now looks outdated.

A source close to the committee actually described the most recent Gambling Act of 2005 as “puritanical”.

In case I sound like Cassandra, please believe me that I am nothing of the kind.

Clearly many highly responsible people get fun out of a modest fl utter on the horses, the dogs, or whatever tickles their fancy.

Yet we are repeatedly told we are living in austere times and paying off our national debt is a priority.

One EU country is virtually bankrupt and a couple more are not far from it, so it seems an extraordinarily bizarre time for our Government to be urging us to gamble with our heard-earned savings.


http://www.express.co.uk/ourcomments/view/335911/Jimmy-Young