conquered — the national
game. Operators’ gross profits
from football punters rose
from £578 million in 2015-16 to
£1.1 billion in 2019-20. During
televised football matches Ray
Winstone would implore fans
to “bet in-play now”, while the
online casino company 32Red
helped to bankroll Wayne
Rooney’s move to Derby
County, where he was given
the number 32 shirt to remind
fans of the brand. Davies
calculates that viewers were
exposed to almost 90 minutes
— another match, effectively
— of gambling adverts during
the 2018 World Cup.
What about broader
society? Davies argues that
something fundamentally
shifted during the Blair era,
when the government strategy
was to “integrate gambling
into the general leisure sector
instead of treating it as a pariah
activity”. The media moral
panic focused on supercasinos,
but we were looking the wrong
way: the internet had arrived,
followed by the smartphone,
putting “a supercasino... in
[every punter’s] pocket”. By
2016 the value of onlinebetting had overtaken the
other forms combined.
Gambling adverts became
mainstream; the lottery acted
as a Trojan horse, normalising
other activities, and most
significantly came the
explosion of fixed-odds betting
terminals, machines that
allowed customers to stake
£100 every 20 seconds on
casino-style games, such as
roulette. Before a clampdown,
bookmakers earned almost
£1 billion a year from them,
while they simultaneously
wrecked lives. As Davies
writes: “Almost every time
I venture out to visit
bookmakers I see people losing
their minds on the machines.”
The book is packed too
with the nefarious tricks and
the predatory practices of thewider industry. Most
egregious is the treatment of
so-called VIPs. About 60 per
cent of industry profits come
from just 5 per cent of
gamblers, according to
research by a House of Lords
committee. So how are these
super-customers rewarded?
With champagne, it seems, but
not necessarily a duty of care.
Davies quotes a 2020 article
from The Daily Telegraph
where the adult children of a
woman discover that she had
gambled away £88,000 with
William Hill before she died.
The woman had both alcohol
and gambling addictions and
had developed liver disease
that left her brain-damaged,
yet the bookmaker made her a
“VIP”, inviting her to Ascot and
to see the Stone Roses perform.
This brings me to my only
niggle with the book: we don’t
hear from enough women.
Gambling addicts are still
mostly male, but the industry
is increasingly chasing the
female pound. One of Davies’s
own stories from last month
said that a growing number of
women — up to one million in
the UK — are at risk of harm
from gambling, especially
casino and bingo sites.
So what can be done about
the industry? While Davies has
set out the problem adeptly, he
acknowledges that solutions
are more difficult. Tougher
regulation, via a government
review, is coming this year,
and it should include a ban on
football shirt sponsorship, as
well as, potentially, stake limits
on online slot machines and
stricter affordability checks on
punters making big bets.
Davies argues that we also
need a gambling ombudsman
to ensure that gamblers do not
face financial ruin.
Investors can also play a
part. In 2019 Norway’s largest
pension fund, KLP, purged
“sin stocks” from its portfolio,
so it would no longer hold
shares in any company that
derived more than 5 per cent
of its revenue from gambling.
Even if gambling ends up in
retreat in the UK, though, the
industry’s tentacles are still
spreading overseas. Africa
represents a vast potential
market that is being
increasingly targeted. If Davies
is considering a second book,
there’s an obvious subtitle:
how gambling conquered the
world. Let’s just hope other
countries learn from what we
have got wrong. crewarding work: Denise
Coates, Bet365’s founder, is
believed to have received one
of the biggest pay packets in
British corporate history in
2020, taking home £421
million in salary, plus an
estimated £48 million in
dividends. As Donald Trump
noted in The Art of the Deal:
“To me, a gambler is someone
who plays slot machines. I
prefer to own slot machines.
It’s a very good business being
the house.”
I suspect most of those who
choose to read this book will,
like me, come to it already
sympathetic to Davies’s
argument. I am the great-
granddaughter of two
Methodist ministers, so the
Wesleyan view of gambling as
a malignant force has probably
seeped into me. Yet when I
started the book I was still
sceptical about its subtitle.
What changed that suddenly
made Britain in thrall to this
industry? And has gambling
really “conquered” Britain,
or is that just the hyperbole of
a headline?
As Davies shows, it has
certainly permeated — evenCHILDREN’S
BOOK OF THE WEEK
NICOLETTE JONES
Grandpa Frank’s Great
Big Bucket List
by Jenny Pearson,
illustrated by David
O’Connell
Usborne £6.99, age 9+Jenny Pearson’s third comic
novel marries madcap
adventure with family
drama, as a legacy (possibly
accidental) leaves young
Frank nearly half a million
pounds and the
responsibility to look after
a hitherto unknown grumpy
grandfather who shares his
name. In an attempt to
make his grandpa happy,
the boy compiles a bucket
list of fun but dangerous
experiences he would enjoy
himself, and some shared
near-disasters create
a bond between the Franks
that helps to console the
youngster for the
unreliability of his parents.
The parents, too, learn from
events, are tested and
come good. This story
handles loss and loneliness
lightly, believes families
should support and forgive
each other, and offers lots
of cheekiness and giggles.WATCH OUT FOR
Saving the Butterfly
by Helen Cooper,
illustrated by Gill Smith
Walker £12.99, age 4+With illustrations that find
sweetness in sadness, this
touching picture book is the
resonant story of refugee
siblings who have lost
everything but each other,
and of the connection with
a trapped butterfly that
helps to heal the elder child.Odds and
ends A man
playing slot
machines in
Skegness,
Lincolnshireked on gambling
Up to one
million
women in the
UK are at risk
13 February 2022 23