Tune in to the BBC Television’s Panorama programme on Monday, November 5 and watch another piece of very bad publicity for the British gaming industry…
The programme is set to debate the Fixed Odds Betting Terminal and its place in bookies’ shops. I have never made any secret of the fact that while I applaud any endeavour which helps our industry survive and subsequently thrive, there are limits. The bookmakers were undoubtedly in trouble before FOBTs came on the scene.
Since then these terminals, B2 machines for those who understand the incomprehensible and confusing way we managed in the UK to have seemingly as many varieties of gambling as Heinz famously has of canned veg, have taken over. They have developed into quite simply, hard gambling. And it is available to anyone to step in off the street and enjoy. It is pernicious, savage and compulsive.
I hated them because I have always been frightened half to death that someone is going to wake up to them and throw all of the industry out with the bookies’ bathwater. The industry itself has long protested that the FOBT in the bookies’ is strangling the AWP (all right! Category C) in the pub and the machines in an arcade. Why should anyone play a pub machine or be entertained in an arcade or adult gaming centre, when he can step into a bookies’ and play for infinitely higher prizes?
Amazingly, the regulators – the Gambling Commission to be exact – has insisted that there is no evidence of compulsive gambling being fostered by FOBTs. Have they never been into a bookies’ and watched them in operation?
Now the plan to expand and further liberalise British gambling put forward by a House of Commons committee, is being turned on its head by the Prime Minister and his deputy. Political ‘brownie points’, of course. That will be further supplemented by Panorama, I have no doubt. I also have no doubt that our industry’s worst enemy, the Daily Mail, will have a field-day.
I just hope that the bookies’ determination to hang on to the golden goose doesn’t result in bad eggs being thrown at the rest of the industry.
