MY NAME is Mick, and I have a gambling problem. My problem is that I have hardly backed a winner during this week’s Cheltenham Festival. There are many fellow-sufferers; the bookmakers reportedly pocketed £50 million on Wednesday alone. Yet we will be back today, trying to pick the winner of the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

This might make us ordinary punters, quite liderallee losers. What it does not make us is a crowd of vulnerable victims and potential gambling addicts in need of professional intervention to keep us from the knacker’s yard.

Yet all we hear about is the supposed boom in “problem gambling”. This week’s report that the Government plans to open more casinos prompted protests from worthies such as Colonel Vic Poke, of the Salvation Army, and a “Professor of Gambling Studies” (and they accuse punters of wasting time and money). Not to be outdone, the government-appointed Gambling Commission outlined its new rules to promote “social responsibility in gambling” and protect “children and the vulnerable”.

Government fantasies about supercasinos sparking regional economic regeneration are ludicrous (although no more so than the schemes to “regenerate” entire cities with an art gallery and café). But the lectures about “socially responsible gambling” are no better.

New Labour’s approach appears to be to free up the gambling laws but regulate gamblers more tightly. The Gambling Commission’s rules will require casinos and betting outlets to “take a preventative approach”, bombarding innocent punters with information about “how to play responsibly and where to seek help”, looking out for “at-risk behaviour” and intervening to propose counselling or self-exclusion agreements, before banning “gambling addicts”.

These measures say less about how to deal with the relatively few problem gamblers than about how little the authorities think of the rest of us. We are seen as essentially helpless individuals, powerless to handle risks or to prevent ourselves sliding down the slippery slope into a pit of binge drinking, obesity and irresponsible punting. Thus gambling has now been added to the growing list of “addictions”, as if it were an illness requiring the men in white coats.

The authorities that want casinos to provide clients with a “reality check” should take their own advice and stop patronising punters. Incredible as it may seem to them, we do understand the odds. Adults should be free to make their own choices, including the wrong ones.

Whatever happened to having a flutter as a bit of harmless fun, a (hopefully) cheap thrill to make your heart, well, flutter in a world that runs from risks? We might do better to consider how society could offer something more meaningful to get excited about, rather than trying to sanitise our few red-blooded pastimes.

Back at Cheltenham, meanwhile, my get-out is “when in doubt, back A. P. McCoy”, the Roy Keane of racing, an Irish jump jockey so single-minded in pursuit of winners it is a wonder some educated eejit has not referred him for addiction therapy.

IN LONDON, we face the prospect of Thames Water’s pre-emptive hosepipe ban. A spokesman for the company told my website, spiked, that the ban is as much about raising awareness among consumers as actually saving water.

It might be more to the point to raise that desalination plant vetoed by Ken Livingstone, the Miserabilist of London, and sink some more big reservoirs. Still, I was relieved to learn from The Times that filling children’s paddling pools should still be allowed this summer. Otherwise I fear that the authorities would need all the water in London to put out the fires of a Parents’ Revolt.

Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com

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