Gambling: addiction is not freedom

A report today raises an issue which has quietly become one of the most pressing elements to address in pursuit of the wellbeing of a large part of society; gambling. It highlights the entirely unequal relationship between young men in particular and the gambling industry.

Or, as one commentator puts it succinctly and most directly to the point – it's not a fair fight.

The impacts of gambling are well known but its recent origins seem largely to have slipped our political memory. The impacts are straightforward; gambling is good for no-one but the casino/bookie/algorithm owner. While people can experience it as fun in small doses, it is hardly a scale of 'fun' which is irreplaceable in society.

By the nature of its fundamental economic model, most gamblers must lose. If the average gambler won, it would not offer a business model. If you gamble then on average you must lose. It is fundamentally an economic drain on its participants. It is also addictive and it changes our risk appetite and makes us more impulsive.

These are all harmful traits and are little justified by 'a bit of fun'. But for most people, gambling will not become a major problem. The acute problem with gambling is for a small number who are especially vulnerable to addiction. The business model is that the house always wins for most people, but for a small number of people the house takes everything.

The precise numbers involved are hard to derive as there is a degree of interpretation and statistics often rely on self-reporting on an issue about which many people feel shame. But roughly somewhere between 40 and 50 per cent of the the British public gamble and up to about five per cent of them (depending on how you count it) become problem gamblers.

Overall that represents about 0.5 to 1.5 per cent of the entire UK population. What is so objectionable about this other than the scale (this is best understood as a public health emergency) is that problem gamblers are the key part of the gambling corporation's business model. In the industry parlance, a player who is out of control and spending recklessly is a 'whale'.

And it is from 'whales' that gambling corporations make their real money. And it is very much real money – the UK gambling industry turned over £4.3 billion last year. To put that in perspective, the entire agriculture sector had a turnover of only slightly more than three times that amount. We have configured our economy to spend £1 gambling for every £3.50 on primary food production.

If pubs were run on this basis they would offer free drinks until they identified the worst alcoholics and then would use complex scientific processes to destroy the lives of those alcoholics and take all their money. Yet because this now largely happens on the internet it is seen as different in some way. It is not.

Worse, it is so insidiously profitable it has spread. The dubious practices of the gambling industry is now the primary business model of social media companies, free-to-play games, the Ultra Processed Food industry and a depressingly wide range of other economic activity. Competing in a market just isn't as attractive as creating a trapped, irrational and addicted consumer base that just keeps giving you their money.

What people forget is that this was all unleashed by Tony Blair a remarkably short period of time ago (the Gambling Act was passed in 2005). It was done in the name of 'fun' and 'economic growth'. It has been pushed with a narrative of 'freedom' – your freedom to become addicted. This is a hard right narrative and should never have been accepted. We do not see other forms of addiction like heroin or alcohol as being 'freedom issues'.

What this all points to is straightforward – the best gambling is no gambling. While for many it does only a little harm, it also does no good. It would be better if it didn't exist. And it does exist only because Blair was lobbied by large corporations and then 'built a narrative' that this was a gift to the public rather than to the corporations.

But the regulated restrictions removed by Blair were sensible and proportionate – ban on advertising, tight regulation of where betting can take place, clear demarcation of what is and isn't gambling and so on. Put very simply, those should be restored, we should see very big reductions in gambling as a core public policy aim and we should fight the narrative that this is either anti-freedom or bad for the economy.

In fact it would enable us to spend our money on more constructive things with higher productivity returns, and it would remind us that addiction is not freedom but the absence of freedom.