A LEAFLET from my local MP came through my door this week. There is a picture of jolly Tessa Jowell with a class of smiling seven-year-olds supporting a longed-for new secondary school in my area. Here is warm and understanding Tessa meeting a D-Day veteran. Overleaf is concerned Tessa — “a parent herself” — at a nursery, empathising with child-care problems.
But none of these Tessas will get my vote again. Because the Tessa I cannot get out my head is the one who has been in every newspaper: the Culture Secretary smiling as she places a chip on a roulette table at a Piccadilly casino.
The publication of the Gambling Bill makes me feel I have tumbled into an Alice in Wonderland moral universe where I stand shoulder to shoulder with the Daily Mail and religous leaders against a Labour Government promoting greed, venality and vice.
Because gambling is a vice. Why will no one say this any more? Why are Labour ministers so worried about being modern, populist and — to use Tessa’s word “grown-up” — that they must pretend that roulette is a leisure activity like ten-pin bowling, that casinos are no worse than multiplex cinemas, that sitting at a slot machine shovelling in the wage you strived all week to earn is a bit of innocent fun?
Gambling is the most heartless and rapacious manifestation of capitalism: it takes money from the poorest and gives them nothing in return. Except the insatiable desire to do it again. Socialism has always offered a route to working-class betterment through education, self-control, by living honourably and working for the common good. What a travesty that under this Labour Government the British have become Europe’s biggest gamblers.
Gambling is about living for a ten-million-to-one chance, wealth and glory for zero effort, squandering the present for an imaginary tomorrow. We already have a culture of instant gratification where fame is just a reality TV show away, where a dream holiday is only unaffordable until you fill in a credit card application.Young people are habitually in debt, they struggle to afford mortgages, postpone having children. They can already gamble on the internet, their TV digibox, at the newsagent, on a mobile phone. And yet now the Government wants to create even more outlets for them to squander what they have on the spin of a wheel.
Of course, you could argue that there is nothing wrong with a flutter — a lottery ticket or the football coupon my parents have filled in all their lives. You watch the bouncing balls, count score draws, screw up the coupon then forget about that Spanish villa for another week. But this five minutes of expectation is far from the all-consuming experience of casinos, the glitzy side-shows, the free booze and food to make punters stay long enough to lose any winnings.
The Government claims that the Bill will regulate a £39.4 billion industry which, with the growth of internet gambling, largely evades control. But suggesting that punters will turn off their PCs and dash down to cheery super-casinos where “problem” gamblers can be counselled is like suggesting that state crack dens would regulate heroin usage without creating more addicts.
However, Tessa “as a parent” Jowell is concerned about child gambling. Teenagers henceforth will not be allowed to blow pocket money — or cash thieved from mum’s purse — on the chip shop one-arm bandit. It will stop my sons squandering two whole quid winning a talking Basil Brush in Scarborough’s penny arcades. But is removing this most anodyne branch of gambling any more than a sop to social conscience? Under-18s don’ t have families to impoverish or mortgages to foreclose or the power to raise ruinous sums on credit.
But when they have, the super-casinos will be waiting. Huge US companies have already earmarked sites in run-down areas such as Salford and Hull. How enticing MGM Mirage’s wad must be to hard-up councils. But it will be a short-term gain: political clout transferred from elected officials to almighty, irremovable casino bosses.
Gambling is a moral issue: gambling revenue is quite simply dirty money. I don’t want our cities regenerated with young couples’ house deposits. I don’t want our new secondary school created with family Christmas funds or pensioners’ gas bills. I voted for Tessa, expecting an MP who would combat the gambling industry, not act as its pimp.
Black and white film
MIKE LEIGH’S new film Vera Drake opened The Times bfi London Film Festival this week and this tale of a back street abortionist is a valuable reminder to those who threaten abortion rights of a time when an old lady with a rubber syringe, carbolic soap and cheese grater was a girl’s best hope.
But did the film have to be so crudely black and white? Vera the poor-but-decent abortionist, is nearly a holy martyr, smiling as she goes about a life full of kind deeds and refusing any payment for “helping girls in trouble”. The sole upwardly-mobile character is a total bitch. And the posh characters are ciphers to make the point that rich girls could buy safer abortions. I left the film stunned by the keen visual sense of postwar Britain and the deep performances. But also feeling that a little ambivalence, subtlety or moral contradiction would have won more sympathy than agit prop.
Convenient death
LAST WEEK I wrote about an Australian family who were arranging a funeral for someone who, although ill, was still alive. But it seems this practice is not confined to Oz.
“I work in the business and never cease to be amazed at what people do when death darkens their door,” one reader wrote. “It is not uncommon for families to book the funeral before the person has died. The excuses range from ‘I have a holiday booked’ to ‘we are completing on the sale of mother’s house on Saturday so it would be really convenient to have the funeral on Friday and stay there rather than in a hotel’.” What they would do if the undeceased miraculously rallied, one can only wonder.
janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk
