A clear example of this took place last month, when Times of Israel reporter Emanuel Fabian published a first-person account headlined: “Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story.” In the American press, the article rated only a quick mention, nestled between updates on ships stranded in the Strait of Hormuz and the Pentagon’s comments on US strategy. 

But when this latest chapter of America’s military struggle with Iran is a distant memory, Americans will still be wrestling with the matters raised by Fabian’s article. His account is the proverbial canary in the coalmine, warning us to get a handle on the power of online prediction markets before they hijack our political process.

Here are the basic contours of Fabian’s story. On 11 March, he wrote a Times of Israel blog post, reporting that an Iranian missile had struck Israeli territory. The missile, he wrote, had hit a wooded area and caused no injuries. After publishing this seemingly unremarkable news update, he began receiving emails, and then text messages, from people he did not know. The senders urged him to correct an “error” in his reporting and clarify that the area had been hit by shrapnel rather than by an entire missile. Fabian, believing his reporting to be correct, declined to make the change. But the messages continued, becoming more urgent, and then a bit sinister, and then overtly threatening. One read: “If you do not correct this by 01:00 Israel time today, March 15, you are bringing upon yourself damage you have never imagined you would suffer.” Only after Fabian went to the police with these messages did the threats stop.

By this time, Fabian had figured out that the source of the writers’ obsession with an otherwise insignificant missile attack was that it was the subject of a bet on the blockchain-powered prediction site Polymarket. The bet was on whether Iran would strike Israel on a certain date. The precise terms stipulated that Iran would have “struck” Israel only if Israeli territory were hit by a full missile rather than by fragments of an intercepted one. The pool at stake was $14 million. (Polymarket has since denounced the threats directed at Fabian, stressing its compliance with the law and its commitment to national security.)

When I read Fabian’s article, I was reminded of a scene in George Orwell’s 1984, in which protagonist Winston Smith, a record keeper in the “Ministry of Truth”, is asked by his bosses to change an “error” in the historical record. His specific assignment is to change the official history — which claims that his nation of Oceania has always been at war with the nation of Eastasia — into the claim that Oceania has instead always been at war with the nation of Eurasia. This “error,” of course, is not an error at all. His bosses’ demand simply reflects the government’s wish to maintain continuity in its propaganda, thus justifying its current military engagement with Eurasia. Smith duly complies, consigning the outdated history to the Memory Hole and writing the lie into truth. 

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Why the West is getting poorer

By John Rapley

Over recent decades, we have frequently been warned of the potential for biased journalists, powerful politicians, or moneyed special interests to instill false consciousness in the public to serve their own ends. But we have paid far less attention to the potential for gambling on politics or geopolitics to accomplish the same ends by means more impactful, more pernicious, and less traceable. The type of pressure that Polymarket’s bettors applied to Fabian over a relatively unimportant event — pressure to which a less courageous journalist might easily have succumbed — not only stands to undermine the integrity of journalistic reporting (the shared basis of facts on which democracies make decisions) but the integrity of decision-making itself. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that it isn’t doing so already. 

Gambling is an ancient industry, but real-time prediction markets on topics other than games and sports are far newer. At the scale we observe on leading prediction market sites like Polymarket (founded in 2020) and Kalshi (founded in 2018), where bets on events from election results to military interventions frequently attract pools of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, the industry is practically newborn. 

On Polymarket, trading volumes approach $500 million in a day. The company earns a commission off users’ bets, and payouts can be massive. To bettors, using Polymarket feels like placing bets on sports book sites like FanDuel or DraftKings. But its customers are not betting on horse races or soccer matches; they’re betting on the most impactful events in the world. 

The industry of sports betting has never been able to effectively neutralize the risk that gambling might cause some outcomes to become fixed. Horse racing has always had fixers ready to slip a certain horse a syringeful of drugs to speed it up or slow it down. Just this year, 20 college basketball players were indicted for their involvement in fixing games. Do we really think that when we subject politics and world events (and public information about them) to the same set of incentives, with betting pools running into the hundreds of millions, we’ll get a different result? 

Currently, the only federal regulator of sites like Polymarket and Kalshi is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), originally formed in 1975 to regulate the trading of futures for commodities like corn and oil. In the absence of other regulators, CFTC has transitioned into regulating prediction markets. Initially, CFTC resisted Polymarket’s entry into the American market on the grounds that it lacked registration with the agency, but in 2025 Polymarket acquired a company that was already registered, making the point moot. The only CFTC enforcement action against Kalshi so far, which challenged the presence of US election prediction markets on the site, ended in a court ruling that the CFTC ban was inappropriate.

CFTC enforcement is hamstrung by the fact that the only major law governing the topics listable by online betting markets is a rather vague provision of the Commodity Exchange Act allowing CFTC to ban contracts that are “contrary to the public interest” if they involve “activity that is unlawful under any Federal or State law, terrorism, assassination, [or] war”. So, when six senators decided to send CFTC Chairman Michael Selig a letter in February asking him to increase enforcement against Polymarket, they were reduced to portentously asking whether he really thought that contracts like “Maduro out by…” or “Will Russia capture Myrnohad by…” were “in the public interest”. Presumably they meant the interests of the public in the US, not that of Ukraine or Venezuela. (Polymarket has updated its rules to clarify that insider trading is banned; Kalshi has said it is working with a compliance firm to identify “bad actors”.)

Government action against political betting sites has thus far taken on a partisan complexion, with Democratic legislators pushing regulations to limit insider trading by (Republican) members of the executive branch. All six senators who signed on to the letter to Selig were Democrats. Most pending legislation in Congress respecting political betting markets deals with insider trading by knowledgeable politicians, and the issue has become lumped in with efforts to regulate stock trading, like Congress’s recent investigation of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over his purchase of defense stocks just before the launch of US military action in Iran.

It is unsurprising that Congressional Democrats have zeroed in on government officials’ betting on politics and geopolitics while a Republican administration occupies the White House and has outsized access to sensitive information. The issue is a valuable political cudgel. They will likely lose that interest as soon as a Democratic administration enters the White House. (The whiplash of Democrats’ sudden deep interest in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal after a decade of indifference suggests just how quickly.) More importantly, this partisan approach all but ensures that no meaningful reforms will ever become law — if Congress ever passes them, the president won’t sign them.

But even if Congress were to pass any of the bills currently under consideration, the risks of insider trading are merely the tip of the iceberg. Far harder to regulate are influence campaigns like those Fabian experienced — whether directed at newsmen or at decision-makers themselves. If we’re already concerned about the influence of the wealthy and powerful on political decision-makers, how much more should we worry when those same individuals are making wagers on the outcomes of policymaking? 

Let’s run a thought experiment. By the standards of Polymarket, the pool that ensnared Fabian was quite small. A larger pool, with $79 million wagered as of Tuesday, asks who will be leading Venezuela at the end of 2026. Current President Delcy Rodríguez is heavily favored with 64% odds, with deposed President Nicolás Maduro at 15%. Clearly, anyone who bets on Maduro stands to make quite a lot of money if he returns to power. 

Let’s suppose a top executive at a semiconductor manufacturer, who is weighing whether to sign on to a proposed new export restriction, bets on Maduro’s return. While meeting with Commerce Department officials, he mentions his deep desire to see Maduro reinstalled. Then, on 1 December, President Trump announces that Maduro has learned his lesson from his year of incarceration. Trump releases him to Venezuelan custody, and he’s back as president. A few months later, new semiconductor export regulations are announced, to little fanfare.

Would that be illegal? Of course, in all kinds of ways. But would criminality be extremely difficult to prove, and the political event itself almost impossible to stop through the legal process? Also, yes. Scanning the leading markets on the Polymarket homepage, it takes but an ounce of creativity to imagine 10, 20, even 100 such scenarios. 

It’s more than enough to convince yourself of two facts: first, that it’s inevitable that prediction markets will very soon exert significant influence on political decision-making, if they aren’t already; the money is simply too good. And second, that cracking down on “insider trading”, no easy task in itself, would be woefully insufficient to solve the problem. 

For one thing, in a democracy where everyone has a vote, everyone is (to some degree) an “insider”. What’s to stop a voter, just as a sports fan bets against his favorite team to win a bet, from voting against his political interests for the same reason? Then there are the many powerful people who can exert political influence in oblique ways, but would not, by any legal definition, be considered “insiders”.

And if betting markets can so profoundly influence the political process, how much more could they influence news, think tanks, and policy institutes — industries where most workers make little money and might stand to get a big payday by tweaking reality just a little bit? For some, the temptation will simply be too great. (Readers may recall one such example from the think tank world last November, when a subsequently fired employee at the Institute for the Study of War altered the think tank’s publicly available map of Russian-held territory in the Ukraine at the eleventh hour to reflect a territorial gain that did not happen. By the time the map was changed, the gain was considered so unlikely that Polymarket bettors stood to earn returns of 33,000% on their investment if it occurred.)

It’s fortunate for Americans that there is a potential solution to the online prediction market problem that is as elegant and complete as the problem itself is multifaceted and complex. That is: limiting online betting to sports and games only. Case law is clear that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to regulate online gambling (up to and including banning it). Congress should use this power to ban political prediction markets, and do so quickly.

Some such prediction markets might remain in casinos or local betting parlors. But the experience of the last few years shows conclusively that it is only the engine of the internet that has enabled political and geopolitical prediction markets to become as large and as consequential as they have. If they are not allowed online, there will be little risk of American policymakers or news reporters being bullied, cajoled, or bribed into changing the facts to help someone win a bet. 

One likely reason that the political class has thus far been slow to regulate prediction markets is that in only a few short years, it has come to rely upon them for information. Studies have shown that prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket can be more accurate at predicting election results than traditional polling. Prediction markets also offer predictions on events in areas like war and diplomacy that are not usually polled, and they do so (at least as far as the voyeuristic political class is concerned) for free. But they will need to learn to live without them. Our quality of governance and our national wellbeing are more important than the convenience of pundits, policy analysts, and campaign managers. 

If Congress bans online political betting, it will head off a major destabilizing influence on our republic. Forging a path forward for our fractured country — a path that integrates the genuine diverse interests, desires, and passions of all Americans — is hard enough. With voters, businesspeople, and policymakers betting on those decisions, forging that path will be impossible. 

Even if the crash wiped out only a vocal and desperate minority of leveraged retail traders, it revealed how dependent many Americans, especially young men, are on various forms of gambling for income. Other symptoms of this dynamic included the “Liberation Day” mini-crash in April and the Gamestop stock craze in 2021. The risks that retail traders are taking seem more and more dramatic; a few make millions and post their winnings on Reddit; thousands seek to emulate these gains and get wiped out.

The economy of the 2020s is marked by a nervous, Zyn’d up desperation. The emergence of prediction betting markets like Polymarket, Kalshi, and Robinhood, moreover, suggests that an entirely novel economic system — the casino economy — has emerged from the information economy, the same way the information economy emerged from the midcentury industrial economy. 

Platforms like DraftKings, Robinhood, or Kalshi clearly incentivize us to engage in gambling behavior. And an extremely fragile labor market and future for labor means gambling to survive is increasingly necessary. The crypto crash illuminated, but did not create this reality; gambling (like OnlyFans, to cite another adjacent phenomenon) happens in proportion to a decay in dependable, salaried wage labor.

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The Millennial virtue economy is dead

By Matthew Gasda

We are pushed and pulled into the casino economy. This is an enormously complex phenomenon, but it’s worth trying to understand why this is happening and what the ramifications are.

One factor is that the information economy — sometimes known as the economy of bullshit jobs or email jobs — de-conditioned millions of college-educated Americans to tangible toil, as technical or laboring jobs were shipped overseas or taken by cheap migrant labor at home. These shifts, determined by Wall Street, the cheap-labor lobby, and neoliberals in both major parties, were of immense public consequence; yet the public had little input into them. Between 2008 and 2023, the real economy shrank. Young people entering the labor market either managed to secure email jobs (IT, management, human resources, and the like) or fell into an abyss of service-sector precarity; many straddled both sectors, serving as adjunct philosophy teachers by day and as baristas by night. 

The Obama economy’s rebound after 2008 was partly driven by the lottery-like dynamics of NGO jobs and tech jobs — by private and public email jobs. Getting an email job at a startup that succeeded could mean being set for life, while the runners-up would remain economically insecure. These jobs were also ideologically aligned, meant for and granted to so-called coastal elites with the requisite progressive views. This was the economy of New York, LA, DC, and Seattle (the heartlands were buoyed by natural gas, but those jobs also came under attack from the green agenda).

The problem with the Obama-era version of the information economy was that the products minted by NGOs and tech companies and advertising firms didn’t help us do anything — didn’t improve our quality of life. NGOs too often took up niche causes (while laundering their donors’ money). Tech companies visibly eroded quality of life (addictive social feeds, for example, mean going to restaurants where people at the same table scarcely look at each other, let alone, you know, talk). Private equity and hedge funds asset-stripped the real economy, piling debt atop debt to buy up legacy firms, refusing to invest in them, and thus dramatically boosting the likelihood of bankruptcy.

Getting an email job in 2011 was like winning the lottery (especially when those jobs came at startups that vested equity in the company); but the “good” jobs that Millennials found or created in the early Obama era were largely fake in the sense that they what they “produced” was bad for everyone who didn’t work in tech, finance, or advertising. These jobs contributed to the erosion of community life, and detracted from the well-being of Americans at large, and so there was never growing prosperity, or — to borrow the buzzword du jour — collective “abundance.”

The Millennials who were doing well in the Obama economy were doing so at the expense of many  others who weren’t. The product manager who made Facebook more addictive enriched himself at a cost to its users. NGOs that pushed ideological propaganda into school districts or hospitals or the arts achieved narrow victories for themselves, but inflamed social tension, disempowered parties and other mass-membership organizations, and eroded the quality of discourse. 

This economy was value-negative, and its economic benefits, what there were of them, were not well-distributed geographically or across class lines. It was an economy of gross inequality. It now appears to be giving way to something else. Between 2009 and 2019, the top 1% of US households captured roughly two-thirds of all wealth gains; median household wealth, by contrast, barely returned to pre-recession levels. During the same period, private-equity assets under management mushroomed to more than $5 trillion, up from about $1 trillion, and tech giants became Leviathans.

As the email economy falters, and as email jobs are either cut in Washington by a populist Trump administration or replaced by AI, elite laptop-class and credentialed coastal professionals are still habituated to expecting a lot for not a lot of work. That’s where the gambling mindset comes in. Stated bluntly, whether you got into the email job economy and are now feeling precarious, or whether you, like myself, never made it in, you have incentive to gamble.

Yet we have neither the skill nor the taste for the daily, dependable, reliable labor of our grandfathers and grandmothers. The insignia of the information economy — bloated degrees, bloated grades, bloated accomplishments, ideological hypothyroidism — are increasingly useless, and probably should be useless.

The casino economy stands at the threshold of the information economy and whatever comes next. What’s less clear is whether it’s transitional or semi-permanent. It may define the whole next era. Americans have some agency yet in this historical unfolding.

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Beware San Fran’s rationalist cult

By Matthew Gasda

While the long-term success of the Trump administration’s economic agenda is far from guaranteed, there’s a refreshing long-termism in the integrated platform of tariffs, corporate reinvestment, and public stakes in private companies — especially companies related to national security, chips, heavy metals, aerospace, and defense. Reduced dependence on migrant labor, which suppresses wages on the lower rungs, would also have long-term benefits. The Trump administration would like to get America back to making things, and for those things to be made by Americans. (On the other hand, Trump’s embrace of crypto and rampant speculation provides reason to be skeptical. There’s a worrisome, even loathsome, enthusiasm for vapor over material abundance.)

And the revitalization agenda is somewhat bipartisan. The most salutary aspect of both parties’ economic ideals is connected to re-embracing the real, rather than the informational, fake product and fake productivity. The general popularity of economic visions predicated on material, street-level reality is encouraging (in contrast to the 2010’s emphasis on ideological and digital “progress”).

At the same time, both parties and politicians across the spectrum are speculators themselves, trading inside information for massive stock gains. (Members of Congress consistently outperform the market by 6% to 12% annually). The casino economy has also been casino politics for a long time.

As for me, I buy dividend stocks, having gotten burned by day trading in 2021. Occasionally I’m tempted into losing money on a football or basketball game. I really enjoy my weekly poker games and the friends I’ve made playing poker. But what I’d like is to not be quite as excited as I am when I can buy groceries with my poker winnings, and for my friends to not be worried about the price of Etherium as it drops in real time during our game. I’d like gambling to be fun (again).

Today, the sport is second only to football in terms of the enjoyment, employment and economic benefits it brings to our economy, making in excess of £1.4bn a year and bringing in over £4bn to the economy. But this sporting success story is, at least according to industry spokespeople, now under threat. Rachel Reeves proposes to raise the rate of taxation on horse racing bets, to bring these into line with other online gambling vehicles such as roulette. In response, for the first time in its history racing is going on strike: on 10 September, four scheduled fixtures will not race.

I’ll confess that when I first read this story, it seemed of a piece with all the other ways in which Starmer seems implacably at war with what’s left of England’s traditions and pastimes. His party has already set about taxing to extinction anything even faintly redolent of regional life, such as small farms and independent schools. Nor is fun any longer respectable: pubs and fast food restaurants quail under Starmer’s dour Fabian gaze. Horse-racing’s cocktail of royal heritage, rural life, and that most un-Fabian of working-class pastimes — gambling — surely makes it a logical target for the Starmerite commitment to grinding flat everything distinctive about our national culture.

But a closer look reveals that that despite Labour’s track record of malignantly anti-English cultural vandalism, it isn’t really culpable here. Indeed, the proposal now being pursued by Labour was, like many of Starmer’s greatest hits to date, originally the progeny of some iteration or other of the Tories. Rather, Labour is responding to a far deeper, more intractable and far-reaching engine of change: the internet. And the question for horse racing is one that faces us all, now: under that solvent force, how can anything based in the “real” world adapt and survive?

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What is wrong with the Right?

By Mary Harrington

As attested by the still-visible ruins of the ancient Hippodrome in Istanbul, horse racing for entertainment and betting goes back a long way. But English racing was born alongside modern England, and developed in tandem with industrialization. Newmarket held its first recorded race in 1622 and — after a Cromwell-shaped hiatus — saw the Restoration monarch, Charles II, sometimes riding his own horses at race meets. Not long afterward, Royal Ascot was founded under the patronage of Queen Anne, cementing the link between racing and Britain’s modernized constitutional monarchy.

Like Anne, Georgian England’s wealthy loved the sport — and the betting. The aristocratic Jockey Club was established in Pall Mall in the mid-18th century, for upper-crust fans of sports betting. Gradually acquiring racecourses across England, the Jockey Club would in time develop into the body governing English horse racing, before being relieved of that duty in the Nineties following charges of corruption.

If the emerging mercantile and landowning classes loved racing (and sometimes a whiff of corruption), so too did the new urban working class. Britain’s industrial revolution saw land enclosures and farming reform pushing peasant populations off the land. These departed either to manufacturing jobs in England’s swelling cities or overseas to the nation’s expanding colonial holdings — whence wealth flowed into the booming urban economies, driving demand across classes for new diversions.

Ascot Heath, long a horse racing destination, stands as both symbol of and solution to this changing social fabric: it was secured as a permanent racecourse in 1813 by one of the very Acts of Enclosure that displaced so many peasants into urban factory life. We might wonder if some such individuals, having fled rural England for slum life and shift work, were drawn to the races at least in part by the nostalgic spectacle of green racetrack and graceful horses, emblems of a world they’d left behind.

But the driving engine of the sport was always, for upper and working classes alike, the betting. As gambling fever gripped Georgian England, it had drastic negative social consequences for some of the rich. The noted dandy Beau Brummel, for example, who set the dress-code that still holds in modified form at Royal Ascot, was ruined by betting and had to flee England in shame and penury in 1816. Meanwhile, social reformers tutted at its deleterious impact on the masses, and thus as gambling increased, so too did the pace of regulation, mostly directed at the working classes.

The 17th century saw four separate ordinances restricting gaming and gambling, with nine further laws passed in the 18th. And as Britain’s industrial revolution and imperial expansion reached its zenith in the 19th century, the popularity of racing was broadened again by the same technological innovations that was, by degrees, emptying the countryside of peasants. The Telegraph flashed racing results all over the country, while railway travel enabled larger crowds to attend race meets. In turn, still further regulations were passed to control gambling and gaming: some 21 additional laws.

But no one wanted to ban the gambling altogether. It was too profitable, too popular — and especially in horse racing, too interwoven with the sport. What crystallized, then, was an institution that embodied the sensibility of high imperial Britain, blending snobbery and populism, conspicuous consumption and hard-nosed commerce, vice and glamour, chance and skill, industrialism and rural life — along with a degree of meritocracy also characteristic of industrial-era England’s fighting sensibility. At the last count (as in business or war), what matters in racing is victory — and there, performance ultimately matters more than pedigree.

We can perhaps pinpoint this era as bookended by royal racing fans: the Royal Ascot founder Queen Anne, and the late Queen Elizabeth II who, over decades as a racehorse owner, won every classic race in Britain except the Epsom Derby. But the two 20th century world wars began the long, slow collapse of imperial Britain. And, in their aftermath, broadcast media upended the delicate balance between gambling’s profits and social costs.

TV and radio turbocharged unregulated street betting even more radically than the telegraph, driving calls for an expansion of licensed betting shops. This finally resulted in the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act, which legalized bookmakers operating off-course. The result was a huge increase in gambling turnover — but also that bookies were no longer confined to racetracks, which significantly dented the betting profits accrued by the racing industry.

Industry outcry resulted in the 1961 Betting Levy Act. This introduced a statutory 10% levy on the profits of high-street bookies, to offset the loss of race-day revenue. This money was then handed to the Horserace Betting Levy Board to distribute “for the improvement of horseracing”. It was a classic bit of post-war managerialism, responding to a changing economic landscape by nationalizing the affected industry and spawning a new Blob to control it. Since that Act, the HBLB’s principal remit has been distributing Levy money as race prizes: some £72 million annually, according to the body’s most recent business plan.

These sometimes staggeringly large prize pots (the Grand National’s purse totals £1 million) in turn attract wealthy owners and power a lucrative, cut-throat downstream industry. For a sense of the immense rewards accruing to winners, over her lifetime as a racehorse owner the late Queen alone racked up over £8 million in racing prizes. But this begs the further astronomical sums that change hands for prized horses, or even just the chance of breeding from one: the Grand National winner Flightline was sold for $1 million as a yearling but is predicted to earn over $50 million in stud fees over his lifetime. And for race-lovers not rich enough to own a whole horse, there’s always the syndicate: such a group plays a central role in Jilly Cooper’s 2010 steeplechase bonkbuster, Jump!

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Labour's war on the countryside

By James Rebanks

This all incentivizes the effort, dedication and obsession that powers English racehorse culture at ground level, while employing some 85,000 people across the country. But since the turn of the century, things have changed again: now, online gambling has overtaken the high-street variety, creating new challenges for an industry long dependent on funneling the profits of gambling back into the sport itself.

More recent rounds of legislation have sought to capture online betting revenue for the racing industry, and Reeves’s current proposal aims to streamline the resulting convoluted system. But the issue now being contested, between government and the racing industry, is more fundamental still: at issue is a qualitative difference between online-only forms of gambling, and those — such as racing — that rely on older, more elaborate real-world sports.

Should we care what happens to an industry that profits off hope, economic inequality, and sometimes addiction? No one can blame the industry for protesting a tax proposal that so directly menaces its historically specific funding infrastructure. Conversely, while there’s no disputing racing’s deep historic roots in English culture, I am probably the kind of bourgeois sourpuss who would have supported all 21 of the 19th century laws curbing gambling. As such, I struggle to muster much enthusiasm for defending what I suspect is at least sometimes an exploitative and seedy industry. And in an age of administrative bloat and a strained public purse, it’s not unreasonable for a government to seek more streamlined and fruitful approaches to taxation.

But on one metric at least horse racing deserves our wholehearted defense: it happens in the real world. The central issue it raises affects us all: the qualitative difference between forms of gambling that rely on older, more elaborate real-world sports, and online-only varieties that are simply lines of code on a server. We didn’t realize how much we would miss local journalism until it had already been destroyed by social media; should we shrug as real-world sports are treated as though indistinguishable from virtual competitors?

According to the BHA, Reeves’s proposed tax hike would result in a £330 million hit to the industry in the first five years, potentially threatening thousands of jobs. Perhaps we should just shrug, too, at this possible risk, to an industry that has always yoked glamour and excitement to addiction and bankruptcy. Perhaps racing is wealthy and unscrupulous enough to survive. But perhaps it wouldn’t be.

We cannot lose sight of what is distinctive about real-world institutions and offline cultures — even those with a seedy underbelly — when these face new digital challengers. You don’t need to be fit enough to race the Newmarket Town Plate to grasp the importance of horse-racing to England’s broader equestrian culture. And once degraded or destroyed, all that activity and the skills, practices, and institutions that support it would also disappear.

We should not be too casual about waving through the replacement of human, real-world cultures by virtual competitors. Unlike online roulette apps, more or less by definition a racehorse must (as the anons say) touch grass. On this issue, perhaps Labour’s bean-counters should too.

Nate Silver’s compelling new book, Living on the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, is ostensibly about mathematical risk, and how it can be understood and used to benefit society accordingly. But I think it’s more about something else: the way we live now. It’s the book Trollope might have written if he had spent his life not as a post office employee but gambling, reading libertarian philosophers and hanging around on the underbelly of 4Chan and Reddit.

The first thing to understand about Silver, best known for his polling website FiveThirtyEight, is that politics does not come naturally to him. As he tells us: “I played poker professionally before I ever wrote a word about politics or built an election model. I still feel more at home in a casino than at a political convention.”

From this starting point, Silver guides us through his world, a particular group of people who he describes as living in “the River”. Poker players, he explains, love water metaphors, and the River is full of “tributaries and niches” inhabited by various types who have indeed spent their lives in the underbelly of the internet and, most importantly for Silver, in casinos. Often, they have played poker for huge sums of money. But the River also has “a canon of influences and ideas”. These range from “game theory and Nash equilibria to expected value and marginal utility” and various other things you have only dimly heard of.

These are people obsessed with numbers, especially ideas of probability so important to games like poker (the book’s first section is all about gambling). This has several effects, not least that it all makes you live a certain way. River people like Silver are “EV maximizers” (“expected-value maximizers”): Rivermen (and, as Silver points out, the River’s inhabitants are overwhelmingly men) take an analytical, strategic approach to gambling, investing and other aspects of life, trying to calculate the most optimal “play” in any given situation. This leads them down some curious paths, not least when Silver considers whether it’s “EV maximizing” to have fries with your sandwich or opt for the healthy side salad. “It might,” he concludes, “depend on how good the fries are.”

For the River, sacred places are not Harvard Yard or the Capitol, but Las Vegas, a “shrine to risk-taking, excess, progress, and capitalism”. All of this is, of course, an affront to what Silver calls “the Village”, which “consists of people who work in government, in much of the media, and in parts of academia (although perhaps excluding some of the more quantitative academic fields such as economics). It has distinctly Left-of-centre politics associated with the Democratic Party.” It is, in other words, the River’s nemesis.

See what’s happening here? Almost all that the Village, shorthand for the established elites, has traditionally prized is viewed by the River with scepticism, not least elite higher education. And this is probably no surprise. It’s hard to think of places that would be less welcoming to Rivermen. More than this, if the River esteems poker players, hedge funders and venture capitalists (gamblers of a different stripe), its emperors are Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Elon Musk — all college dropouts (Musk, admittedly, only at postgraduate level).

What emerges is by now familiar: suspicion of “experts” or “elites” — and the desire to disrupt, or more correctly, take an axe to them. Confrontation is unavoidable. As Silver writes: “Harvard is the grand cathedral atop the hill — there is no more quintessentially Village institution.” So, when hedge funders such as Bill Ackman, rightly enraged by Harvard President Claudine Gay’s tawdry failures to condemn calls for genocide against Jews as hate speech, led the successful drive to remove her, it was “a symbolic coup” for the River. (“Want another sign that the Village and the River are explicitly at war?” Silver asks. “The New York Times’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI.) VCs, Tech titans, data scientists, hedge funders — these are the master-gamblers of Silver’s universe. As he concludes: “The quants won… We’re living in their world.”

Naturally, this can be problematic. First off, revolutionaries almost always curdle into the despised elites they worked so hard to overthrow. Considering the market dominance of Venture Capital firms, Silver concedes that “if success is concentrated only among a few elite firms… to the point where they essentially can’t lose, then VC is becoming more and more like the incumbent institutions that Silicon Valley would deign to disrupt”. The Ivy League’s elite capture doesn’t disappear; it’s merely replaced by that of Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Google and Tesla.

And who are these people? Well, many of them are just Riverman who hit the jackpot. Elon Musk may be a first-rate engineer and businessman, but he’s also an example of what happens when an incel makes $200 billion.

Back in the day, to amass a fortune as an industrialist or oil baron, you had to at least deal with people. Now, the Masters of the Universe are more comfortable with code than conversation. A few years ago, I watched Mark Zuckerberg launch the metaverse, which he did while performatively “chatting” with a grinning — and to my mind clearly terrified — young woman. It was just weird.

Silver understands this. “In the River, it’s common to find people, like Elon Musk or the poker player Daniel ‘Jungleman’ Cates, who self-identify as having Asperger’s syndrome or autism,” he writes. “It’s also common to hear people refer to themselves or others with terms like ‘Aspie’… Depending on the context, this may be derogatory, but it isn’t always so.” For the River, this is more of a cultural marker than a medical diagnosis. What the mainstream views with suspicion or does not understand becomes a source of pride. What it prizes, like Ivy League universities, the River eschews.

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The problem with gambling and risk is that, in irresponsible hands, it can be catastrophic. Silver tells the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto-king turned felon. SBF, he writes, is “a nerdy, overconfident, Adderall-popping, video-game-playing, youngish white guy who has a severe gambling problem and is probably somewhere on the autism spectrum”. This makes him “a common typology” for the River. But he is also a crook, which Silver well understands. SBF’s problem was that he could mouth all the platitudes about EV, Effective Altruism, Rationalism and all other River obsessions — one consequence of reading this book is that I finally understand Dominic Cummings’s blogs — but it made no difference. It’s not even that he didn’t understand risk: he just didn’t care.

So why did so many stats-literate, data-munching, probability-obsessed altruists and tech bros fall under his spell? Once more the answer centres on ideas about the way we live, or rather the way the River seeks to live, and how it will ultimately always fall short of its loftiest aspirations. You can try to game all aspects of life, seek out the EV in every situation, calculate the odds, run your models and algorithms, but in the end, you remain (for the moment at least) irreducibly human. In the words of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz when assessing the SBF disaster: “It must have been the cult of personality. I guess it’s the only explanation.”

And it’s sometimes the only explanation elsewhere, too. It’s no coincidence that gambling, geopolitics and war all centre on the effective calculation of risk. Of course, there are vast and obvious differences between them in terms of cost, scale and repercussion; not least because risk in gambling is typically confined to the realms of chance and individual choice, while geopolitics involves a vastly greater degree of multifaceted interaction and its consequences can be global.

But there is a similarity too: if many of today’s finest minds are gamblers, history has thrown its greatest thinkers at geopolitics. And even when the stakes are life and death, when the players are so various, the same patterns persist. The cult of personality moves history — and it does so repeatedly. The River may have given us SBF, but geopolitics gave us Mao and Stalin and Putin. This is the price of being human, and it will continue to be so. You can bet on it.

The movie was co-written and directed by Robert Rossen, who had been a member of the Communist Party until he broke with it in 1947. He was initially blacklisted, but then testified behind closed doors and named names. The Hustler was his first, and only, successful film after the blacklist and his testimony. It is a parable of the inextricable links between money, character, success, failure and love. American style.

“YOU OWE ME MONEY!” Bert the professional gambler, backed up by thugs, unforgettably erupts at Eddie, the pool-playing genius, at the end of the movie. Scott roars the last word out as if it were the eternal answer to an eternal question, the alpha and omega of creation itself. And that is what the movie is about: money as a finality. Not as in The Color of Money — the trite title of Martin Scorsese’s disappointing sequel. Rather, money as ontological essence; money as, to borrow Spinoza’s characterisation of it, “the abstract of everything”. Money as the consummate medium for the human desire to possess.

Eddie “Fast Eddie” Felson is a young, uncannily gifted pool player. But he’s also a pool hustler. He enriches himself by tricking other players into thinking he’s not that good. He gets them to place high bets in the expectation they will beat him, and then relieves them of their money once he’s taken them in.

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Eddie, though, has his hamartia, his tragic flaw. He travels all the way from California to New York — from the kingdom of illusions to the city of grimy reality — accompanied by his shill, a middle-aged sad-sack named Charlie, to play Minnesota Fats, performed to perfection by Jackie Gleason. After playing the legendary Fats, considered the best pool player in the world, for hours in Ames, the pool room that is Fats’s domain, Eddie trounces him. He wins $10,000 — the equivalent of over $100,000 today. Charlie tells him it’s time to leave. Eddie refuses. “The pool game is over when Fats says it’s over,” Eddie snaps. Fats waits, uncertain whether the match will continue. Bert, clearly Fats’s backer and handler, has quietly seated himself in the pool room, in a chair slightly higher than the others. He says to Fats: “Stay with this kid, he’s a loser.”

Eddie doesn’t care about the money. In that sense, he is what an American is supposed to be, from the Western sheriff, to the outsider-hero private eye or cop, to Superman and Batman. He cares about being true to himself. So he looks at Bert with pain and surprise when Bert makes his comment. They continue to play and Fats ends up destroying him. Eddie is left with nothing. Wildly drunk at this point, he stumbles toward Fats with a few crumpled $100 bills and begs Fats to keep playing. Money is still the medium of his pride. Fats declines. Eddie falls to the ground, and the poolroom clears out. Bert departs, shaking his head.

Penniless, Eddie parts ways with Charlie and lives in a bus station for a while. There he meets, in the station cafeteria, Sarah (Piper Laurie), who is the movie’s moral centre. Lame, alcoholic, depressed, cultivated, sensitive, psychologically astute, Sarah lives in a small apartment alone with the elaborate lies she tells herself. She and Eddie begin a steamy affair. Sarah, who resists Eddie in various ways, falls in love with him, and Eddie, who flings himself at Sarah, clearly, if unconsciously, uses her for sex and solace until he can right himself.

The movie’s turning point occurs when Eddie, feeling restless and boxed-in with Sarah, quarrels with her and leaves. He follows his calling and goes out to hustle. But on this occasion, Eddie is antagonised by a young player who talks down to him. Eddie loses his temper. “I don’t rattle, kid. But just for that, I’m going to beat you flat.” Yet Eddie is rattled. His fragile pride is bruised. As a result, he reveals himself as a hustler too early. Just when he is about to collect his winnings, the young man’s friends force him into the bathroom and break his thumbs as punishment for his deception. Eddie drags himself back to Sarah’s, arriving on her doorstep broken and in tears.

A transformation occurs. Eddie and Sarah no longer simply eat, sleep and make love. Eddie begins to genuinely care for Sarah; Sarah drops her shield of sarcastic irony and ministers to Eddie’s inner and outer wounds. The length and fine control of human opposable thumbs are what distinguish us from any other primate. When Eddie has his thumbs broken, his pride is broken, and he is humbled in an elemental way.

For Rossen, the erstwhile communist, Eddie’s injuries make him not disabled, but profoundly human. He cannot grasp anything. This confers a deeper humanity on him in a grasping society. He becomes an ideal human type. For communists, and Christians, being broken is a permanent condition of being human. For liberals, too: the philosopher John Rawls’ famous and influential idea of the “veil of ignorance” imagines people having to choose what kind of society they would like to live in given the worst-case scenario of being a person at the very bottom — a broken person, that is to say. Most people would choose the fairest, most equal and most caring social structure.

If Rossen had indeed wanted to write a communist or, indeed, a Christian parable, he could have ended his movie right there. In a society whose cardinal acknowledgment is that everyone is broken — lame, or with shattered thumbs — everyone is protected from everyone else. Quod erat demonstrandum.

But that would be liturgy, not fiction. It would not be honest. Bert comes back into Eddie’s life and performs his own hustle. He offers to put up the money Eddie needs to make a comeback. Though in conventional Hollywood terms, Bert is a villain, it is hard to deny that he is on the side of the living. “So I got talent,” Eddie says to him at one point. “So what beat me?” Bert replies: “Character… Everybody’s got talent.” But what, the movie now asks, is the American definition of “character”?

In the event, Eddie takes up the challenge and agrees to let Bert put up the money for his long road back. Bert invites Eddie to the home of a rich Kentucky patrician to play pool during the Kentucky Derby. To Bert’s annoyance, Eddie brings Sarah.

From the beginning, Bert, the scourge of the broken, of “losers”, makes his contempt for Sarah clear. He thinks she is holding Eddie back. In fact, she is. After the patrician, Findley, beats Eddie — he plays billiards not pool, and Eddie needs time to adapt to the new game — Bert tells Eddie that it’s time to leave. In an echo of what happened at Ames, Eddie pleads with Bert to stake him more money, assuring him he knows he can beat Findley.

At that moment, Sarah enters Findley’s den and tells Eddie not to beg. She urges him to leave. “That man [Findley], this place, the people. They wear masks, Eddie. And underneath the masks they’re perverted, twisted, crippled… Don’t wear a mask, Eddie. You don’t have to.” Accepting society’s shallow conventions as the price of restoring his pride, Eddie tells her to “shut up”. He plays Findley and beats him, winning a small fortune. While he is walking back to the hotel, Bert, who has taken a taxi, allows himself to be seduced by Sarah, in part as a way of making a trophy of Eddie’s pride; he keenly envies Eddie. Revolted and shamed by her self-abasement, Sarah commits suicide in the bathroom. Arriving back at the hotel, Eddie discovers what happened and flies at Bert in a rage. The police officers at the scene pull him off.

An entire book could, and should, be written about how those Jewish screenwriters in Hollywood who had once been communists almost seamlessly assimilated communist values to Christian ones. Sarah delivers herself to Bert for the purpose of sacrificing herself, Christ-like, to the truth. Winners like Bert, she wants Eddie to know, are the true losers — but never mind that Bert survives, prevails and flourishes. Seeming losers, like Eddie are the true winners — but never mind it was Bert who taught Eddie how to stop losing. By means of her death, Sarah teaches Eddie a lesson beyond their social world. She teaches him to be a saint.

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At the movie’s climax, Eddie returns to Ames and soundly beats Fats in the presence of Bert. It is the sweetest revenge for Eddie. Ever the unsentimental businessman, Bert offers to stake Eddie again, at a reduced rate. Eddie, saintlike, refuses. “Too high, Bert. Price is too high. Because if I take it, she never lived, she never died. And we both know that’s not true, Bert, don’t we, huh?” Bert reveals himself as the breaker of worlds, threatening that if Eddie does not give him his share of Eddie’s winnings: “You’re gonna get your thumbs broken. And your fingers. And if I want them to, your right arm in three or four places.”

Eddie still refuses. Bert relents and tells him that he’ll let him go unharmed. But, he warns, “Don’t ever walk into a big-time pool hall again.” Eddie is freed from hustling. He can now pursue his vocation simply for the joy of fulfilling his destiny in his work. Or as Marx put it, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

This, then, is the heart of the American dilemma. Does the true American character lie in not living like an American? In refusing to count up your money to see who’s best? Or does it lie in mastering the terms of American success? In sacrificing ethical freedom for practical liberty? Eddie might be free at the end, ethically speaking. But how does he, whose calling it is to play pool, and to hustle pool, now fulfil his destiny in his work? Now that he has thrown off his mask, how does he live in a world where wearing a mask is essential to survive? Has Sarah hustled Eddie?

As for Bert, he is still a king — the directions at the end of the script read: “Bert takes his seat again on his throne overlooking Ames, sipping his glass of milk [like the eternal American boy].” Yet he is, as Eddie has told him, “dead inside”. And Sarah was right when she told Eddie: “[Bert] hates you ‘cause of what you are. ‘Cause of what you have and he hasn’t.” Democratic envy — no individual my superior! — is sharper than a serpent’s tooth. As someone once said, you can build a throne with bayonets, but you cannot sit on it. Still, Bert is sitting on his throne.

Ethical freedom? Or practical liberty? Some will scoff and say such a dilemma is an effete fiction. Life simply isn’t so clear cut. But some might say that, as it becomes more extreme, not just in its politics, but in its everyday rhythms, American life is coming down to just that: Eddie or Bert. If everyone is indeed broken, does a politician, say, claim to be a champion of the broken ones, only to deceive them with an abstract morality? Or does a leader emerge who runs roughshod over the broken, preaching robust survival at all costs? Do you believe the otherworldly promises that the broken will prevail, or do you throw in your lot with the worldly ones, who break?

To put it another way: Who will emerge as America’s Hustler in November? The impossible saint? Or the intolerable sinner?

In its oblique gesture towards a besieged and perhaps vanishing greatness, Robert’s question brought into play the usual unreflectively naïve assumptions about the uniquely inferior quality of today’s crop of politicians. This is simply a form of political exceptionalism about the present. It is an uncritical habit of thought that calls to mind a notional past in which politicians were upstanding, deft, civil, conservatively-dressed, models of probity. Consider that by some obviously relevant standards — intelligence, moral fitness, command of policy — they are the best pair of candidates we’ve been presented with for several electoral cycles: nothing special, perhaps, but then, it follows, nothing especially bad either. It bears pointing out that the last time the public was invited to vote, the choice was between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.

It must of course be admitted that for a workplace of some 650 people, the House of Commons does seem to give rise to more than its fair share of workplace indiscretions. Publicising pictures of your genitals and distributing your colleagues’ phone numbers to potential blackmailers; dipping into political donations to pay-off “bad people” and ending up chained to a radiator; browsing pornography on your phone inside the chamber House of Commons; offering to lobby parliament while being secretly filmed by undercover journalists. At times, the scandals operated according to a kind of nominative determinism for ease of recall: Pincher was the bottom grabber, Parish the profane one, and Bone  — upsettingly — the flasher.

As for Rishi Sunak, it is, of course, a bitter irony that his roll of the electoral dice has been skewed by the scandal of politicians making dodgy wagers against manifestly unfavourable odds. As it stands, five Conservative political figures, including two now-unendorsed parliamentary candidates, have come under investigation by the gambling watchdog for placing potentially illicit bets on the date of the election. It’s a squalid spectacle. The characters, nonentities; the motivations, base; the sums of money involved, comparatively paltry.

But however hard it is to summon up enthusiastic moral condemnation, it is even harder still to feel anything close to surprise. That gambling is, apparently, rife at Westminster is probably in no small part because it calls on the same dispositions and skills as politics does.

If there is an underlying unity to the many and lurid transgressions of our outgoing cohort of parliamentarians, it is their near pathological inability to properly respond to risk. But, then, anyone who wins a seat in the house of commons is, more or less in virtue of that very fact, someone who fancies their chances against sometimes wildly unfavourable odds. Even for the well-qualified candidates, merely being selected by a local association is an often random, taxing and capricious process, a fact testified to by the gleeful operation of Twitter accounts such as “Has Sebastian Payne got a safe seat yet?”.

It is an important fact about MPs that each and every one is a person who decided at some point to channel vast resources of time and energy, and very often their own money, into a process that would at some point or other see them being humiliatingly rejected in a regional leisure centre at 4am. It comes to them all, eventually. And for the time that they are in post, the attraction of thinking of much political action on the model of a gamble rarely dissipates. “ACHAB”, the Tory diarist Alan Clark used to console himself when some scheme or political wheeze seemed to be heading for the rocks: “Anything Can Happen at Backgammon”. The phrase was one exported from the gambling room at Clark’s club, Brooks’s “where games can swing at a late stage on an unpredictable run of the dice”.

Nor would it be sensible to blame politicians too much for acting on the basis of instincts that might share much of the phenomenology of the often unreliable twinges of a gambler’s gut instinct. Sometimes there may be little else to go on. Such instincts, under the right circumstances, may even yield a distinctive kind of political knowledge. It is a well-attested insight of psychology that gut reactions, and fast and frugal heuristics, can provide a reliable basis for knowledge. An expert political operators may, for instance, instantly read a room, or effortlessly notice the most powerful person in it; in the subtle cues of a colleague’s facial expression they might detect weakness or the prospect of betrayal; like a master chess player taking in a board at a glance, they might instantly see a position as a “win” for one side rather than the other.

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The most effective political operators tend to be those who have a lot of such intuitive knowledge. Whether they do or not is usually the sort of thing that one can assess only on the basis of demonstrated performance. Rishi Sunak, by most people’s lights, has very little.

More challenging than the thought that our politicians might be gamblers by disposition — not all of them cut from Clark’s cloth, admittedly — is the knowledge that we actually want them to be rather good at it. Risk-taking is constitutive, rather than incidental, to political life. Political realists, going back to Machiavelli, have emphasised the intelligent management of luck as being key to effective political leadership. A level of daring that might be inappropriate in more sheltered walks of life can be indispensable to successful political action, aided by the absence of any clearly defined or properly enforceable code of professional ethics in political life — the non-existence of which so distresses Question Time audiences.

Calls to clean up politics, to drain the swamp and restore a sense of decency to public life are leitmotifs of politics of the populist Right, Left and Centre. That such partisan charges can be credibly made from all sides suggests that a general phenomenon is being misdiagnosed as something more parochial. There hasn’t been a sudden and local collapse in political standards; this critique is insensitive to characteristics of politicians that are long-lived, widespread, and less contingent to the effective operation of political life than might first appear.

Even if panic about the rapid decline of public morals is unwarranted, the widespread belief that such decline is taking place creates a problem, and ironically, an occasion for opportunism. Public trust in politicians has reached an all-time low. Ruthlessly indulging the exceptionalist view in the final leadership debate, Sir Keir Starmer declared with uncanny historical precision that “over the last 14 years politics has become too much about self-entitlement”. Instead, he suggests that Labour will restore a lost ethic of public service to political life. But the suggestion that one can remould the characters of politicians by moral fiat is one that fails to take seriously the structural features that virtually guarantee these traits are selected for. Perhaps Keir Starmer knows that. As Machiavelli would no doubt advise, making a convincing pitch for the restoration of public trust need have nothing to do with actually acknowledging the truth.

Overwhelmed, Bradshaw loaded his few remaining possessions into a clapped-out Jag, and boarded a ferry from Cork to Santander. He had planned to travel on to Portugal, the site of so many holidays with his wife and kids. But they no longer saw him. And where the open sea once promised escape, staring into the ship’s wake now pushed Bradshaw, 36 to despair. 

“Look at the wake of mess I’ve left behind me — look at the lies I’ve told,” Bradshaw remembers thinking. “I don’t know where the fuck I’m going. I haven’t got a house to go anymore, nor a home and I’ve fucked my kids’ lives. That’s when it really hit me. The world would look a lot better without me in it.” In the end, it was the thought of his two sons that stopped Bradshaw from jumping overboard that March night. But not everyone is so lucky. 

In the United Kingdom, this week’s front pages — dominated by reports of an election mired in a betting scandal — threaten to distract from a wider malaise: the fact that there are around 400 gambling-related suicides each year. Just like Bradshaw, young people seem particularly susceptible. Between an underdeveloped brain on the one hand, and frantic advertising from gambling companies on the other, some 55,000 British youngsters (age 11-16) are addicted to gambling. A further 85,000 also believed to be at risk of addiction. 

No wonder activists are pushing hard for change. But without more fundamental reforms — and with the gambling industry as rich and influential as ever — desperate cases like Bradshaw’s are unlikely to disappear.  

Mark thinks he knows why. The neuroscience of gambling addiction closely resembles that of drink or drug dependency. Gambling rewires the brain, flooding it with so much dopamine that the body soon learns to protect itself. That, in turn, reduces the sensitivity of so-called “bliss hormones” — which become less responsive to the high gained from that first successful flutter. As dopamine tolerance builds, punters need to raise the stakes to recreate those early peaks. “Even if it’s a 1,000-to-1 shot,” Mark says, “right down to that very last bet, you convince yourself this is the one that could change my life.” Enter fully-fledged gambling disorders: the neurological state when the brain experiences withdrawal symptoms, and demands higher bets, just to get back to its altered new normal. 

“When you’re betting, the capacity for rational thought goes out the window,” Ryan Cowley explains. “But after heavy losses you get this crushing feeling of guilt.” At his lowest point, the 30-year-old was losing almost £4,000 a day, even as he grew skilled at hiding his problem from family: “I’d start with South American football, switch to the NFL and then of course there’s always horse racing and online slots.’’ Once, he blew his wages on payday — then cancelled and destroyed his bank cards, pretending his wallet had been stolen. He needed an excuse to not pay his mum the room and board she was expecting. 

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Beyond the raw brain chemistry, there’s evidence that young people, like Cowley, are particularly vulnerable to gambling disorders. As Dr Marc Potenza, director of Yale University’s Center of Excellence in Gambling Research explains, the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully mature until around the age of 24. He suggests that, especially for young men, this makes them less able to postpone gratification and control impulsivity — and ultimately leaves them open to the highly addictive products developed by gambling companies. 

Those products, for their part, are made vastly more dangerous by their digital nature. Consider Cowley, whose gambling problem started around 12 years ago, and coincided with the arrival of smartphones and betting apps in his late teens. Suddenly, he not only had a casino in his pocket, but also the power to bet on anything, anywhere. He’s not alone. As a survey published by the Young Gamers and Gamblers Education Trust (YGAM) in March 2024 revealed, nearly 46% of students are gambling more than they can afford, lured by promises of free bets and quick cash. 

Now 23, Robert* has been battling a gambling addiction for five years. His problems began while still a student, when betting became intertwined with watching sport with friends. Watching them celebrate occasional windfalls on their phone drew him in — and soon Robert was losing more and more. When Robert’s parents entrusted a significant amount of his grandfather’s inheritance to him, they were unaware of his problem. But Robert gambled away £15,000 over just a couple of days. “Pretty much all of it is gone,” he says. “I still haven’t been able to pluck up the courage to tell my parents.”

It deepens the problem when gambling companies use the immense power of online systems to their advantage. If you have a gambling platform on your phone, you may have noticed just how regularly you’re required to re-download the latest version of the app. For Bradshaw, that’s some indication of just how rapidly betting operators are evolving their “getting-to-know-you” data-harvesting techniques.

“Within three months of signing up with a betting app,” he explains, “they will have collected 90 key data points, which will go far beyond what your favourite team is, or the time of the day you like to bet. They’ll know exactly which offers to push at you, all tailored to make you feel really smart — too smart to miss out on this great opportunity. And all the time they’re demanding your attention with products that are incredibly addictive.”

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In theory, racking up huge losses in betting binges, like Mark, Ryan and Robert’s, was about to become more difficult, with affordability checks set to be introduced as part of the government white paper on gambling reform published a year ago. It proposed that players who lose £1,000 within 24 hours, or £2,000 over 90 days, should face financial checks. Those who have a net loss beyond £125 each month, or £500 per year, will have to go through “frictionless” checks. Alongside affordability checks, the white paper also included significant proposals for a mandatory levy on gambling operators to fund addiction treatment, education and research.

Now, of course, we have an election on our hands, which will likely delay the implementation of some of the reforms. At the same time, however, many do not require primary legislation and are due to come into force later in the year anyway. But will they make any real difference?

Many anti-gambling campaigners argue that by the time customers demonstrate problematic betting behaviours, it is already too late: they will already have a gambling disorder, and though their betting may temporarily be stopped, the underlying condition doesn’t disappear. Gambling With Lives, for example, is a charity set up in 2018 by families bereaved by gambling related suicide. While they applaud the £100 million earmarked to fund research, education and treatment around gambling addiction, activists are otherwise sceptical about the planned legislation’s overall worth. 

Bradshaw, meanwhile, believes that the law isn’t keeping pace with the technology. Just as the UK’s 2005 Gambling Act couldn’t foresee the harms of the coming smartphone era, he suggests that today’s policymakers don’t understand how AI has already transformed the industry. ‘’It doesn’t refer to algorithms or artificial intelligence at all,” he says of the Gambling Reform Bill. “It is an analogue piece of legislation in an era [when] the gambling operators are already in an AI generation. Using the power of artificial intelligence, hundreds of markets are being formed within each game using all the data they’ve got on the sport, plus all the data on you as an individual. The products are incredibly addictive and the markets are formed so fast that the smartest human being couldn’t work out if it’s a fair bet or not, which of course is precisely the point.” 

For others, the white paper’s most serious omission concerns advertising, which many attribute to the influence of the immensely powerful Betting and Gaming Council, the industry body that represents the interests of UK gambling operators. Since it was effectively deregulated in 2005, the UK gambling industry has swollen into a behemoth, one raking in revenues of £15 billion a year. As a whole, it’s estimated that the sector redirects £1.5 billion of those profits into advertising. That can have a direct impact on gamblers: research suggests that 35% of people with gambling disorders receive daily incentives to gamble, compared to just 4% of those not suffering gambling harm.

The personal impact here is just as stark. Cowley says he’s forced to go on holiday during big events like the Cheltenham Festival, just to avoid being carpet-bombed by betting ads. In April, betting giant 888.com even planted its flag in London’s underground system, with signs provocatively proclaiming that “This Carriage is now a Casino”.

In the end, an online petition forced 888.com to partly withdraw the campaign, but such brazenness can plausibly be linked to the sector’s vast wealth. 888 Holdings also owns William Hill, which was fined £19.2 million in 2023 for — among other failings — allowing customers to lose tens of thousands of pounds within minutes of opening their accounts during the pandemic. That’s still the largest fine ever meted out by the Gambling Commission, but is unlikely to deter 888 Holdings, which last year saw revenues soar by 38% to £1.7 billion.

And therein lies the problem: gambling is an industry that has grown so rich so fast that it can afford to casually treat multi-million-pound fines as simply part of doing business.

Quite apart from the individual suffering, meanwhile, there is rising evidence that gambling addiction is impacting society as a whole. The government’s own research estimates that 0.5% of the population are already problem gamblers. And while the NHS recently opened its 15th regional treatment centre in Sheffield and now has the capacity to treat 3,000 across the UK, many believe it’s unlikely to be enough. With legislation still so weak, Mark Bradshaw thinks we’re in the early days of a public health disaster: he compares it to an “avalanche” that could yet overwhelm the authorities.

But at least he got out. Five years on from his near-death experience at sea, the Yorkshireman seems happier. At 41, he’s living in Dublin with a new family, and spends his time campaigning to protect the next generation of young people from gambling disorders. Regardless, Bradshaw is under no illusions about how dangerous the modern industry can be. “If I’d come of age in an era when sports-mad young men spend half their lives on their phones,” he says, “I would be dead by now.” 

In that battle to replace Macmillan, the big guns Rab Butler, Quintin Hailsham, and Reginald Maudling were all spoken about as successors. But nobody really knew who had the best chance and the public were left in the dark. Because in 1963, no high street bookmaker would lay odds on political events. 

It was the legendary Ladbrokes odds compiler Ron Pollard who would change that. Sensing immense public interest in the outcome of the contest he advised his bosses to run a book on it to gain some added publicity for the bookmaker. 

Prior to that, in the 1920s, political betting had been confined to city traders who would bet on “majorities” — what we now call spread betting — where seat totals would be calculated, and traders would buy/sell above or below the line. 

At the 1931 election, speculators traded over £750,000 on the election and severely under-estimated the prospect of a Labour collapse. The losses of one punter led to a much-publicised court case when a trader refused to pay up, citing the Gaming Act as his defence. In the aftermath, election gambling was outlawed.

Yet, after the war, gambling became a huge part of everyday life for the public. Better job security, higher wages and more leisure time were all themes of the time. The rise of football pools, premium bonds and bingo offered working-class people an outside shot at a huge windfall. Viv Nicholson, a liquorice factory worker from Castleford, won £152,000 (equivalent to almost £5 million today) on the pools with the promise to “spend, spend, spend”.

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By Anthony Broxton

Politicians, particularly on the Labour side, had feared the rise of gambling. Figures such as Ramsay MacDonald had described it in the Thirties as “a disease which spread downwards to the industrious poor from the idle rich”. But society was changing. In a speech in Dewsbury in 1956, Nye Bevan urged his Left-wing colleagues not to be “puritan” and that they should encourage people to “have a good time”. “I do not mind a man putting a shirt on a horse so long as he does not put someone else’s on.” 

When it came to the 1963 contest, Pollard gained publicity from the media for offering the odds despite him pricing it completely wrong. As many commentators and journalists had assumed, he decided that Rab Butler was the clear  frontrunner at 5/4. However, it was the 16/1 outsider Alec Douglas-Home who took out the prize in the end. 

Not everybody was impressed by Pollard’s decision. In a highly hypocritical statement, the Left-wing Labour backbencher Ian Mikardo used a speech in Poplar to criticise Ladbrokes. ”It is a sad day for Britain when the bookmakers turn aside from horses and dogs to make a book on who is going to lead the nation”. He accused the Tories of “dragging the premiership down to the level of the ‘Donkey Derby’”.  

Mikardo would radically change his view in the next decade as he became the semi-official Commons bookmaker, taking bets on political events for the rest of his career. Soon, politicians saw it as a chance to make a quick buck. Before the rise of online betting, if you went to the William Hill shop on Horseferry Road, the nearest one to the Commons, you would often find rogue MPs gambling on football, racing, golf or their own electoral prospects. 

Others won big by backing themselves against the odds. The now-disgraced Liberal MP Clement Freud — who was investigated by the Met in 2016 for histroic child sexual abuse claims — was once notorious for being the shrewdest punter in Westminster when he was the candidate in the Isle of Ely by-election in 1973. Having begun as the 33/1 outsider, he managed to place £1,000 on himself — winning the equivalent of £340,000 in today’s money when he became the MP.  

In the mainstream, however, political betting was seen as a fringe activity in contrast to the big money that bookies took on football and horse racing. By the Nineties, it was still seen as a good way for bookmakers to promote their brand in the serious pages of the newspapers and gain some free advertising. 

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Sports betting is worse than Oxycontin

By Oliver Bateman

In 1997 the press tracked down the Durham taxi driver who had, in 1983, placed a £10 bet on one of his passengers, a young Tony Blair one day becoming prime minister. Again, in 2010, William Hill reported that it stood to lose £1 million after it emerged they had laid bets to two students in 1996 — Justin Tomlinson and Chris Kelly — that one day they would become prime minister. Both became Conservative MPs, but only Tomlinson remains in with a shout of netting a £500,000 windfall. 

In recent years though, political betting has become a serious business as the stakes have grown far higher. The emergence of more firms and markets, combined with the boom in online gambling, has created an increased interest. 

During the Scottish Independence referendum, one punter staked £1 million on the outcome — winning £193,000 over the course of a few hours on election night. Then, in 2016, over £120 million was wagered on the Brexit referendum, while the dramatic Trump/Clinton US contest a few months later was adjudged to have been the biggest single betting event — barring the grand national — the UK has ever seen. 

As of 2023, the industry is estimated to be worth over £14.3 billion and the big winners, beyond the bookmakers, are the Treasury who rake in huge tax revenues. Denise, John and Peter Coates, the owners of bet365, were the third-highest taxpayers in the UK last year, according to the latest edition of the Sunday Times rich list. 

With the 2024 election in full swing, the bookmakers are now readying themselves for what could be the biggest British election ever for punters. William Kedjanyi is the “man with a whiteboard” and Star Sports dedicated full-time politics guru who will be gunning across the country this month. “Political betting has now entered the mainstream,” Kedjanyi says. “Twenty years ago, it used to be just for political anoraks, but as there is more data and more polling companies, the public demand for a bet is increasing.”

Whereas the average sports punter doesn’t use data models to predict the outcome of an event, the political punters are more switched on to trends that are happening. These are, Kedjanyi says “stats people or political scientists with their own models.” All of which means that the bookmakers need to be attuned to what is happening on the ground. 

So far in this campaign, the big question that dominates the betting world is the same one that dominates the rest of the election; just how much can the Conservative vote collapse? 

Paul Krishnamurty is a freelance journalist and professional gambler who writes the Betfair politics blog each week. He has already advised his followers to back Labour and back them to win big. “If you look at recent wins in the mayoral elections in York/North Yorkshire and East Midlands, Labour are winning in places, easily, where they started miles behind. It all suggests these MRP projections and betting signals are accurate”. 

Since the campaign began, the bookmakers have seen money flooding towards Labour and the Lib Dem in their marginal seats. Krishnamurty argues that “tactical voting to help the Lib Dems is underestimated, especially in rural areas”. The flow of money so far suggests that the public have looked at Sunak’s campaign and decided that he is about to take them to their worst defeat in history. The odds of a Tory collapse are shortening by the day — and they are now favoured in some places to win between 50-99 seats.

The only glimmer of hope for Sunak is that the bookmakers, like the pollsters, have got it wrong before. History suggests that it can happen. Not only did they miss the Brexit vote and Trump’s 2016 victory, but they also laid 200/1 odds on Jeremy Corbyn to become Labour leader.

During an election campaign, events can change voters’ attitudes before the bookmakers have caught on. Take 2017 as a case study. The Tories were initially priced to be on course for a handsome 86-seat majority. But as the election unravelled for Theresa May, the chance of a hung parliament was still seen as a huge outside bet — priced at 7/1 with a week to go. On election night — the markets failed to react to the exit poll — and then overreacted by making Jeremy Corbyn the favourite to become the next prime minister. 

The problem for Sunak is events — symbolised in his decision to skip the D-Day commemoration — are now running against him. With each day that passes, the media and the public are searching for the next gaffe to undermine his campaign. 

History also suggests that bookmakers have missed the size of a party’s collapse on the assumption that there is a floor to their support. In 1983 they were slow to respond to Labour’s collapse by offering punters 28/1 on a Conservative victory by 97 seats or more (Thatcher won by 144). In 1997 the bookmakers also sensed that the Conservative vote would hold up with the seat line priced at 367 for Labour to the Tories 242. Sellers of Tory seats had a great night when the party chalked up just 165 MPs as minister after minister was humbled. 

As we approach the July poll, history suggests that the bookmakers could have overstated the Labour lead or actually underestimated a Conservative collapse. And just as the politicians are constantly calculating what risks to take and what they can do to turn things around, the punters watch every move in a campaign to see whether they can gain a new edge or spot the next trend before anybody else. In a world in which Westminster politics is increasingly unpredictable and voters are more volatile than ever before, the iron laws which once ruled politics no longer exist. And the more unpredictable it is, the more interesting it is for punters — just as Ron Pollard had suspected way back in 1963. 

America’s laws on sports betting have been getting increasingly permissive since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992. My cousin, who is in his early thirties, lives in Colorado, where it was legalised in 2019. In his twenties, he tried college, but never finished. Nor did he show a real interest in anything — including serious romance and traditional employment — except DraftKings, which has been his preferred online game since 2014. Back then, it offered nothing but virtual prizes for success in virtual sports; but as states have legalised sports betting, the company, and others like it, have launched highly lucrative gambling apps.

A hamster-wheel life going nowhere is profoundly boring. Sports betting gave my cousin meaning: suddenly every game, every event — even sports he didn’t care about — mattered. It wasn’t only the outcomes he cared about; he placed bets on various scenarios within the games. He was, and is, hooked. There are hundreds of thousands of men like him: the target audience of sports betting apps.

As of April 2023, 33 states have legal, operational sports betting, and a host of companies — including DraftKings and FanDuel — have expanded to meet consumer demand. Some libertarian-leaning think tanks, including the Cato Institute, argue that betting offers a much-needed source of revenue for financially struggling states. The figures have been staggering — since the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling, over $20 billion has been spent on sports betting in the United States, with more than $3 billion in state and federal taxes being paid — and they look set to increase. Sportsbook revenue in the US reached a record $7.5 billion in 2022, up 75% from the 2021 total of $4.29 billion.

Unchecked gambling can have devastating consequences for both individuals and communities — consequences that were well-known even before sports betting was available at one’s literal fingertips, at any hour of the day or night. They include financial ruin, relationship strain and increased crime — including organised crime, for which legal betting operations serve as a convenient front for money laundering. Unsurprisingly, The Free Press recently labelled sports betting the “new Oxycontin”.

The comparison isn’t baseless, but the key difference is that Oxycontin ultimately “sells itself”. When people become physically and psychologically dependent on the highly addictive drug, no additional marketing is needed. Chronic gambling, by contrast, is a behavioural addiction, where individuals crave a thrill — meaning that the product has to be constantly refreshed. The apps track user behaviour, which is then minutely analysed by employees looking for ways to keep people hooked.

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By Oliver Bateman

In her 2012 book Addiction by Design, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll writes that gamblers find themselves adjusting their behaviour based on the features and giveaways provided by casinos, such as in-play betting, cash-out options, or bonus plays. In the decade since, the gambling scene has evolved — from mechanical slots in a handful of states to video slots in nearly all of them, and finally to sports betting on almost every smartphone in the US. The relationship between sports bettors and the growing industry that services them is characterised by a constant interplay, where bettors seek to maintain the ideal balance of dopamine hits, spend, and control, while the industry releases an endless stream of innovations and promotions to draw them deeper into their apps. They dangle special offers to keep time-on-app as high as possible, while draining bankrolls over time — hence the money thrown at new users to convince them to join the service: no one wants to stick around if they lose their wad all at once.

The “zone”, as my cousin describes it, is a state where bettors feel fully absorbed, achieving a balance between risk and enjoyment in which they are perfectly synchronised with the app. He, and enthusiasts like him, have noted that their betting experiences keep becoming “smoother” and more immersive. While data analysts behind the scenes make sophisticated predictions of potential value, this “zone” state keeps bettors anchored in the immediate excitement of the wager, which prevents them from making informed long-term decisions.

Predictably, the rate of pathological gambling in the US seems to be increasing. There was a 45% rise in calls, texts, and messages to the National Problem Gambling Helpline between 2021 and 2022. In New Jersey alone, the state’s Council on Compulsive Gambling’s help hotline has experienced a 200% jump over the past four years. We are staring into a potential epidemic with serious dangers: a report from the UK Gambling Commission revealed that problem gamblers are 12 times more likely to suffer from depression, and the suicide rate among these individuals is considerably higher than among the general population. The argument for ubiquitous, 24/7 sports betting often skates over these facts — as well as the financial costs of this supposedly revenue-boosting exercise. A recent study found that the annual social cost of gambling addiction in the United States is now around $7 billion.

This is partly because gambling addiction is hard to treat. OxyContin withdrawal can often be countered through medication-assisted therapies, while treatment for chronic gambling is slower. It primarily focuses on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and self-help groups, the aim being to address the underlying thought processes that contribute to the addiction — the very same thought processes that the marketing engines of betting companies are working tirelessly to exploit.

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Keir Starmer's gambling problem

By Matt Zarb-Cousin

At the moment, the authorities don’t seem to be taking the dangers of sports betting seriously. The situation does bear a concerning resemblance to the beginning of the opioid crisis, where “deaths of despair” — fatalities related to drug overdose, alcohol, and suicide — were initially overlooked. For years, the addictive potential of OxyContin was ignored, leading to a massive public health crisis. Today, public service messages about “problem gambling” seem to be little more than lip service; state-mandated legal disclaimers are widely disregarded; and policy seems to be moving towards increasing permissiveness.

No one is talking about the best solution to this problem. Prohibition, with exceptions for legacy gambling states such as New Jersey and Nevada, could help reduce overall harm, even if it lowers overall state and federal tax revenues. This policy would aim to reduce the socially unproductive activities that tear apart lives, families, and savings; the focus would shift from profit to public health. Some compulsive individuals would continue to engage in illegal sports betting with seedy underworld bookies, of course, but that wouldn’t make the policy redundant. The era of alcohol Prohibition in the Twenties is often portrayed as a failure, because liquor was still available if you knew where to get it. But research has shown that alcohol consumption decreased significantly during this period, leading to a reduction in alcohol-related deaths and other social problems.

When I put the question of prohibition to my cousin, he shrugged. “It’s whatever,” he said, insisting that this is “just my life right now”. He claimed he would find other ways to “pass the time”, which hints at a deeper, perhaps policy-resistant malaise. Paul Goodman observed six decades ago in Growing Up Absurd that his generation had failed to encourage their kids to pursue a form of “leisure that is not a dismaying waste of a hundred million adults”. Instead, his peers had become television-addicted cogs in an immense system: apathetic and overworked drones unable to make life in America bearable for those coming of age in it. Today, the situation is starker: an ever-expanding class of perpetually online, underemployed defeatists and opted-out NEETs find themselves unable to conceptualise paying off student loans or buying homes. Indeed, there is a specific demographic that seems to be more attracted to sports betting: my cousin’s.

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Why millennials are dropping out

By Joel Kotkin

In this absurd world, to repurpose the analysis of sociologist Max Weber, value-extracting tools like sports-betting apps exemplify forces of calculability and predictability — every game has a betting line, after all — while simultaneously enchanting gamblers with their slightly mysterious nature. Perhaps the underdog will pull through; perhaps my luck, so horrible in real life, is due to change. The suckers whose dollars fill the corporate coffers seem like a lost generation.

What my cousin, and others like him, yearn for is a life of both purpose and enchantment. He desires experiences to rival his grandfather’s submarining exploits in World War II. But societal shifts and technological advancements have created a landscape where opportunities for meaningful adventure, particularly for young men, often seem elusive. In the face of this reality, many, like my cousin, turn to the world of gambling as a means of filling the void. They take their chances repeatedly, hoping that, against the odds, they will find the sense of fulfilment they so desperately seek.

At long last, the Conservatives are clearing up the mess New Labour made of our gambling laws. In December 2020, the current government promised the most comprehensive revision of them since 2005 — to ensure they are “fit for the digital age”. The White Paper is reportedly due to be published at the end of this month.

When Blair’s permissive legislation came into force in 2007, it shifted gambling from being an activity that was tolerated to something that was actively promoted and marketed, in order to stimulate demand. The attempt to “modernise the regulation of gambling for today’s world” had apparently good intentions. In 2004, Blair demanded that opponents of his reforms “go and talk to the people of Blackpool who urgently need the regeneration” that he claimed would be brought about by resort-style super casinos. Gambling, in his eyes, was a vehicle for economic development. He did not represent public opinion in this respect; the vast majority opposed the introduction of more opportunities to gamble.

Gordon Brown ditched the plans for Las Vegas-style super-casinos when he became Prime Minister, meaning Blair’s “modernising” legislation achieved just three notable things: it legitimised Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs) in betting shops, which had previously operated outside of the law. This gave bookmakers permission to offer machines of up to £100 every 20 seconds on every high street. It also loosened the restrictions on gambling advertising, while also removing the need to prove there was demand for a new gambling outlet in order to acquire a license to open one.

There were no provisions to adequately regulate gambling websites based offshore, which accounts for practically all of them. The justifying logic was that the gambling took place where the server was located: people accessing these sites from Britain were supposedly gambling in Gibraltar or the Isle of Man. This ludicrous loophole enabled massive betting brands to base themselves in tax havens, advertise to consumers in Britain and build their businesses free of tax or proper regulation — without even providing jobs in the country it had market access to. Britain was exporting billions of pounds every year to these companies, and all we got in return was a massive upswing in the most harmful effects of gambling.

Public Health England (PHE) estimates there to be at least one gambling related suicide a day, with gambling harms impacting not just finances but relationships, employment prospects, mental wellbeing and physical health. PHE calculate the resulting cost to government to be in excess of £1.2 billion a year. YouGov’s polling of 18,000 people suggested that 2.8% suffered from a gambling addiction — scaled up across the UK, this is the equivalent of 1.4 million people, with a further 1.5 million at-risk.

Labour did very little to rectify some of the more obvious downsides of its gambling legislation. It wasn’t until 2014, under the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, that a “point of consumption” tax was levied on all gambling profits derived from this country. Sadly, it couldn’t be backdated to 2005. Many of the firms remain offshore to this day, which means they still don’t pay UK corporation tax. The coalition government also stipulated that online gambling firms had to be licensed by the Gambling Commission if they wanted to advertise in Britain — a totally obvious regulation New Labour never bothered to insist on.

True, it was Labour that formed the Gambling Commission, but it did a pretty poor job of it. The regulatory body has been criticised by the National Audit Office, the Public Accounts Committee, the House of Lords Gambling Industry Select Committee and MPs from all parties — the running theme being that the Gambling Commission has been “outgunned” by the sector it’s supposed to have a handle on.

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Starmer has proved the Blairites wrong

By Matt Zarb-Cousin

“Light touch” regulation doesn’t work in online gambling. As even the most ardent neoliberal would recognise, the sector cuts across the logic of the free market: it is a win or lose contract between the consumer and the vendor. Given the unlevel playing field between individual and corporation, regulation that upholds consumer protection has to be rigorous.

Yet the Gambling Commission has seen its role as to facilitate the industry’s growth. Consumer protection has been abysmal. Even free bets aren’t free, with gambling firms insisting on obscene so-called “wagering requirements” before people can withdraw their winnings. There have been many cases of people being credited a bonus when they deposit funds into a gambling account, only to find that they are unable to withdraw their winnings unless they bet the total value of what they deposited 99 times — and on products like slots, which have a fixed margin, meaning it’s impossible to win. The Competition and Markets Authority called this “a con”, but the Gambling Commission still permits these unfair terms and conditions.

It also fails to protect the most vulnerable. Online gambling firms derive 86% of their profit from the 5% of people who are addicted or at-risk. In “VIP schemes”, personal account managers encourage people, including those known to be addicted, to gamble as much as possible. Firms profile their customers using third party data and betting history, in order to tailor marketing to gambling addicts who will spend the most. The accounts of gamblers who consistently beat the bookmakers are closed or restricted.

And the most addictive product, online slots, is persistently promoted. Our outdated gambling laws mean there are no limits to stakes online as there are on machines, meaning people are able to gamble thousands in seconds. More than half of the sector’s £7 billion annual profits come from online slots, which are more harmful than any other product — 45% of those who engage with them become problem or at-risk gamblers.

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Compared to the revenues of gambling companies, fines from the regulator are paltry. When they are levied, companies simply see them as a cost of doing business. 888, which is in the process of acquiring William Hill, confirmed that the latter has set aside £15 million in anticipation of a fine. (William Hill is the subject an ongoing license review related to social responsibility and money laundering obligations.) 888 has agreed to pay £2.2 billion for William Hill’s betting shops and its two million online customers based in Britain.

Having unleashed this hellscape, Labour sought to make amends under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership by proposing to review online gambling and to cut the maximum stake on FOBTs from £100 to £2 a spin. But it was Tory Minister Tracey Crouch who delivered the latter policy in 2019, which has led to a 50% reduction in people citing these machines when they present for gambling addiction treatment. This correlates with a 40% reduction in revenue from FOBTs, with no commensurate uptick in other products. Police call outs to betting shops were also down by 38% in the year after the stake cut was enacted.

Building on the success of this, Boris Johnson’s government introduced the ongoing gambling review. But while its scope chimes with policies proposed by Tom Watson when he served under Corbyn, the Labour Party is currently very quiet on the issue.

Watson proposed a series of radical reforms to gambling laws, to bring them into the digital age. This included the introduction of a Gambling Ombudsman to improve consumer protections and the requirement that online slots, like physical machines, have stake limits. He also suggested forcing all gambling companies to reapply for their licenses, and a statutory levy on gambling firms to fund research, education and treatment. This agenda has been adopted practically wholesale by the Conservatives. Since leaving Parliament, Watson has joined as an adviser to the board of Flutter, the betting giant that owns SkyBet and Paddy Power.

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By John McTernan

He is part of a trend. Former Labour MPs Michael Dugher and Anna Turley have respectively become CEO and consultant to the Betting and Gaming Council. Former Ed Balls adviser Gary Follis also works there. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer’s refusal to publish donors to his leadership campaign until after the contest had concluded meant contributions from Peter Coates, the founder of Bet365, couldn’t be taken into account by party members until it was too late. Perhaps Labour’s ongoing silence on the issue of gambling reform is the price paid by a cash-strapped party not wanting to upset too many billionaires who might be able to bail them out come election time.

It won’t help them win votes, though. YouGov’s tracker consistently shows that over 60% of people feel unfavourably towards the gambling industry, while just 7% have a favourable attitude. There is also huge public support for limiting stakes for online slots, and for affordability checks when someone loses more than £100 in a month, which would prevent harm in the middle of a cost of living crisis by curtailing escalating losses in accordance with what’s affordable to an individual. Polling from Survation found support for these reforms to cut across geographical lines, with substantial appeal in “red wall” areas. The pollster also found that 70% of Tory MPs agree that unaffordable losses should be prevented, 64% agreed that gambling should be more regulated, and 68% agreed with introducing stake limits online.

In other words, while Labour remains silent, gambling reform is actively supported by Boris Johnson’s backbenchers. It could therefore become a populist dividing line, putting the government on the side of the public while the opposition appeases offshore corporations. And if Labour does choose to sit idly on the sidelines while the Tories rectify Blair’s mistakes, it will be clear to the public that no lessons have been learned by a party seemingly more interested in working with the gambling lobby than challenging an industry that’s exploiting the nation.

Another ten days would pass before the country went into lockdown. The government was still flirting with the “herd immunity” concept when the football authorities called time, and would not have minded sport carrying on as usual; just as it wouldn’t mind a bit of footie action to jolly up the public right now.

From the outset, the football authorities’ original plan, which was to suspend games for a while, then resume some time in April, looked wildly optimistic. But English football, or, rather, the Premier League, has behaved as if things would turn out differently at home than they had elsewhere in Europe, where all of the league programmes have also been suspended since March. They turned out differently, yes, but not the way we hoped. They turned out worse. London — where 12 Premier League and Football League clubs are based — is the hardest hit capital city in the world in terms of cases, hospitalisations and deaths.

Yet the talk is still of restarting the season, for the Premier League at least and, one presumes, for the Championship. Everyone else has downed tools for good or soon will. Amateur and semi-professional football was brought to a halt on 24 March. The National League’s two divisions, that is the 5th and 6th tiers of the English football structure, voted to follow suit on 22 April, all for health and safety reasons. Tiers three and four, League One and League Two, should finally go into indefinite recess some time in the near future, as their clubs would lose money by playing behind closed doors. So better not to play at all, even if it is a tragedy for clubs who fear facing a £200m ‘hole’ by the autumn.

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Manchester City were just playing the game

By Jon Hotten

So Project Restart is not about enabling the millions of people who regularly play football in England to put the cleats on again. It is not about promoting health and activity in a population which is the third-most obese in Europe behind Malta and Turkey. It is not about protecting 5,300 amateur and semi-professional clubs which are the hearts and souls of their communities, and which stand to be ravaged by the pandemic, as they have close to no means at their disposal other than tickets at the turnstiles and the support of local businesses, most of whom probably have more pressing matters in mind than sponsoring their local side right now.

So is this really about “lifting the spirit of the nation”? The nation itself doesn’t seem so sure, if one is to judge by the findings of a recent Opinium poll for The Observer: 84% of respondents were opposed to the idea of competitive sport making a return; only 7% expressed themselves in favour.

Enthusiasm for a restart is lukewarm within the ‘football family’ itself, especially among the players. The prospect of being quarantined for up to two weeks before being allowed to run out and play in an empty stadium does not seem that enticing to them, to judge by what I have been told privately by quite a few of them over the past couple of weeks.

Yet ever more outlandish proposals have been made to facilitate the return of the Golden Calf and make it more palatable to the paying public when the feast is served. Sky Sports has studied the possibility of using CGI to add virtual crowds to the empty stadiums in which the games would be played. Gordon Taylor, the chief of the Professional Footballers Association, has suggested reducing the length of halves to lighten the players’ workload. According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, Wednesday’s briefing by the Premier League to captains and managers of PL teams included advice such as “turn your face away when tackled”. More of these surreal ideas will probably get some airtime in the days and weeks to come.

This is not about football’s contribution to the UK economy, either, which, while it is substantial (£7.6bn per year for the Premier League alone, according to their own 2019 study), represents only a fraction of the value of the creative industries or of tourism.

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This is not even about saving the Premier League from financial obliteration. The people who appear to be the keenest to restart as swiftly as the government will allow them to are precisely those within English football who have the means and resources to grit their teeth through the crisis and come out of it relatively unscathed. The PL stands to lose £762m in broadcasting revenue should the 2019-20 season be brought to an end; and by its own admission, the loss would still be close to £350m if football were played again in empty stadiums. It is a big hit, there is no doubt about it; but not as big a hit as the raw numbers suggest.

As TV money is split fairly equally between all 20 Premier League clubs, this represents a shortfall of slightly more than £38m per club. Given that the PL’s total revenue was £4.8bn in 2018-19, and even taking into account the disparity between a Manchester United and a Norwich, this is hardly the kind of loss to make the blood freeze compared to what is happening in other industries; especially when a majority of the team owners, be they an individual, a consortium or even a nation state in the case of Manchester City, belongs to the billionaires’ club (the others are not exactly paupers either). They could easily reach into their pockets to supply the necessary fare to get to the other side, hoping the ferryman’s name was not Charon.

The biggest net winners of a swift restart would not be in Britain at all. They are the Asian online gambling operators, whose size dwarves even their best-known and most successful British equivalents, and through whom an estimated $1 trillion is gambled, lost, won and, especially, laundered every year.

These operators have had a tumultuous time of late, to the extent that the few football leagues which have still operated during the lockdown, in Nicaragua or Belarus, for example, have been the subject of tens and probably hundreds of millions of dollars of bets, when they’d normally attract 1,000th of that. Friendly matches between Swedish amateur sides have also been given odds on dozens of Chinese betting platforms, a single one of them generating more than $10m in bets according to an industry insider. The PL might sincerely wish to flush these parasites out of its system, but they would be prime beneficiaries of Project Restart. The same is true of the Bundesliga, La Liga and Serie A, of course; but that in itself is not a reason to ignore that dimension of the problem, which is almost always set aside if not swept under the carpet.

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This is not to deny that the impact of the pandemic on the Premier League will be severe, both short- and long-term; but it will be felt far more acutely in the lower echelons of the game, where many clubs were already struggling to balance their accounts and now face annihilation. Yet all of the talk is of the elite game, as if it were ‘different’ and deserved to be granted special rights, as if it were not an emanation of the game as a whole — something which the global success of the Premier League, an exceptionalism within an exceptionalism, may have made us forget for an instant.

The argument has been made that some of the money salvaged by re-starting the PL season would trickle down the divisions and end up benefiting the whole of English football. This is unlikely, unless the Premier League had as yet unannounced plans to share far more of its income during that period than it customarily does: the money it currently distributes mostly goes to clubs that have recently vacated the top division, in the form of parachute payments, not to the grassroots organisations — despite, it must be added, the excellent work that many clubs do within their communities on a day-to-day basis, which makes the current situation all the more galling.

Nothing prevents the Premier League from resuming playing later in the year, even if it means truncating or re-thinking the calendar of the 2020-21 campaign. The absurd setting of time-specific targets in the face of fluctuating circumstances — “we must re-start by 12 June and have finished by the end of July” is the latest — represents an act of self-hamstringing for which I’ve yet to hear a reasonable justification.

Meanwhile, the Premier League’s clubs are still bickering between themselves, about the use of neutral venues, with at least six clubs, perhaps as many as eight, opposed to playing away from their home grounds as recommended by health and security experts.

Is Project Restart even about sport? Not really, as far as ‘sport’ as we thought we knew it is concerned. Heaven knows in what physical state the players will be if and when they’re asked to perform again after the longest lay-off of their careers, and how their bodies will cope with a hastened return to action, especially if the nine rounds to play are crammed within a short period in order to finish the season before the end of July.

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Or let’s suppose that Liverpool wrap up the title that is their due in a couple of games, then, quite reasonably, decide that they should protect their main playing assets and thereby ‘betray’ some relegation-threatened sides by fielding a reserve team against one of their direct rivals? Let’s suppose… let’s stop there. None of this makes any sense.

The problem is that the Premier League is used to asking an enchanted mirror: “Am I the fairest league of them all?”, and to hearing back: “Of course you are.” And now, it’s as if it had gone through it and turned into the Mad Hatter. It cannot countenance that its relevance to Covid-hit England could be questioned, as it contradicts everything it holds true.

What it is about is government pressure, which was exerted from the word ‘go’, when the Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, first said there was “no reason” to consider directing all UK sporting events to be played behind closed doors, then liaised with the Premier League “with a view to getting football up and running as soon as possible” (his own words) “in order to support the whole football community”. Some PL figures admit privately that they would be relieved if the matter was taken out their own hands, and the health or police authorities forced them to reconsider Project Restart.

What it is about is the fear of being left behind. The Germans — whose Bundesliga is well-placed to become a genuine global challenger to the Premier League — are getting ready for a 16 May restart after being given a conditional green light by their federal government. Portugal, which has managed the pandemic even better than the Germans, is on the way back too, and, while France and the Netherlands have pulled the plug on the current season, Spain and Italy are pushing on with their own Project Restarts, albeit far less convincingly.

It is as if the Premier League cannot stand the idea of watching the train leave the station, waving goodbye from the edge of the platform.