the Labor Party politicians complaining about the number of betting shops
“clustering” the high street due to the demand for the machines. Then came
key casino industry members attacking FOBTs for purely ideological reasons,
emphasizing the pan industry distaste for the product, and finally came the
post-truth pre-Trumpian form of anti-gambling campaign group, the ironi-
cally named Campaign for Fairer Gambling (CFFG).
Set up by a highly litigious casino games salesman, Derek Webb, who
had been rebuffed by the bookmakers in favor of FOBTs, Webb would pour
millions into his campaign. According to Philip Davies, MP (and thus under
parliamentary privilege), Webb “has spent millions trying to get these ma-
chines out of betting shops for no other reason than vindictiveness; that is the
long and short of it. He set up the Campaign for Fairer Gambling on the
back of this issue.”
What made the CFFG different from previous anti-gambling groups was
not its willingness to use false statistics, twist academic research and collabo-
rate with militant academics; they had all done that previously. It was the
full-time employment of staff, the use of a professional
marketing agency and the willingness to contribute
tens of thousands of pounds to various politicians to
garner support. Their argument was FOBTs caused
problem gambling and their maximum stake should be
reduced to £2, which would kill the product dead.
By 2014, the CFFG efforts garnered the support of
the opposition political parties, many of the main
newspapers, and were becoming a serious pain for the
government, which was trying to retain an evidence-
based approach to policymaking—as there was not,
and still isn’t, any evidence that FOBTs cause problem
gambling. There is, however, a lot of anecdotal evi-
dence that problem gamblers like to use FOBTs, and
the emotive stories of their self-destructive escapades
were much used in the campaign. Many were wheeled
out to meet MPs and tell their tales of woe.Bookmakers’ Malaise
A major reason why the anti-gambling brigade garnered such political trac-
tion was the ineptitude of the bookmakers’ political response. At first they
did very little, thus allowing zombie memes to arise. They’re called zombie
memes because they are very difficult to kill. People would be repeating the
accusation that you could lose £15,000 per hour in a machine for years, how-has opened a Hellmouth of ever-increasing regulation and taxation that
may never, in the short to medium term, be reversed.
For those of you in a blissful state of ignorance, let me get you up to
speed on this cautionary tale. FOBTs are electronic gaming terminals that
offer roulette among other games, but roulette is their main product. De-
veloped in the late 1990s, they were offered in betting shops as automated
betting machines, the argument being that roulette is simply a series of
fixed odds bets on a random outcome. This was challenged by the then
gambling regulator in 2004, the Gaming Board for Great Britain, who ar-
gued that roulette, as a casino game, could only be played in casinos.
Both arguments were valid under different laws, and it was agreed that
the courts should decide. Unfortunately, this would not be the case, proba-
bly because both sides realized the potential legal costs, but it was later
agreed that as long as the bookmakers limited the number to four per shop
and kept stakes limited to £100 and prizes limited to £500, they could re-
main, as the soon-to-be-passed new gambling legislation would sort out the
legal gray area. The Gambling Act 2005 was
passed on the April 7, 2005, and it categorized
FOBTs as B2 gaming machines and kept the
quota per betting shop and stakes and prize
limits the same.
By the time the new legislation came into
force, October 2007, there were more than
30,000 FOBTs rolled out across the country in
Britain’s 8,800 betting shops, making an aver-
age gross gaming yield of £33,420
(US$41,998) each. As the financial crisis of
2007-2008 hit the high street, they would
make betting shops one of the few growth sto-
ries, with the number of shops increasing—by
2012, FOBTs would be the most profitable
part of retail bookmaking, taking in more than
over-the-counter bets.High Street Hurdles
As with all successful gambling products to have been introduced into
Britain throughout the last 150 years, with success comes notoriety, and
with notoriety comes condemnation.
At first, it was the trade association representing the slot arcades, argu-
ing that FOBTs in betting shops were stealing their customers. Then cameFEBRUARY 2019 http://www.ggbmagazine.com^23The UK Gambling
Commission repeated
false reports about
children gambling online.
The “clustering” of betting shops on the high streets of
British cities was criticized by anti-gambling activistsp. 22 u.k.:Layout 1 1/10/19 1:18 PM Page 23