THE NATIONAL Lottery Euromillions jackpot, to be drawn this Friday, is expected to top £100 million, making it the biggest European lottery prize in history, dwarfing even Spain’s legendary Fat One. Any armchair punter from this country whose numbers are chosen — live on TV — will find themselves, before the kettle’s boiled, respectably mid-table in the Sunday Times Rich List.

The phrase “it’s a lottery” when applied to school places or hospital places is usually meant pejoratively. But the National Lottery — the system by which society’s also-rans fund marginal government spending — is “something of which we can all be proud”, according to Richard Caborn, the Sports Minister. Mr Caborn, who, like his mentor John Prescott, seems to have reconciled class warrior roots with political expediency, was piloting the Lottery Bill through its third reading in the House of Commons last week. The Bill gives the Government more say over the distribution of lottery funds, and allows more to be spent on schemes relating to health, education and the environment. This amounts to “larceny”, says the father of the National Lottery, Sir John Major, in a foreword to a withering report from Ruth Lea, Director of the Centre for Policy Studies.

But all this hoo-ha is just over divvying up the loot. What about the original crime? The National Lottery, like a mail-order multitool, does several different things badly. That’s not good in a gadget; in an important conduit of public spending, it’s scandalous.

As a gamble the lottery game is a cruel joke. Casinos typically pay out more than 97 per cent of money staked. With Premium Bonds you actually get to keep your stake, plus an average of 3½ per cent, in prize money per year; small wonder the Government doesn’t promote them. The lottery payout? Fifty per cent. And these pathetic returns are so skewed to the jackpots that the average player receives far less than that, even over a lifetime. If you bought ten tickets a week for 50 years, your chances of winning one jackpot in that time would be less than 1 in 500. You would almost certainly lose about 80 per cent of your cumulative stake.

To represent the vanishingly small chance of a lottery jackpot in the game of roulette, you would need to build a wheel with close to 14 million compartments; to scale, the wheel would be bigger than London — too large, in fact, to fit inside the M25. If you were picking a card, the pack would be three miles high. And so on. It could be you.

But it goes to good causes, right? Well, if you want to give 28p to a good cause chosen by the lotterycrats, buy a £1 lottery ticket. Or you could give £1 directly to a charity of your choice — that’s £1.28, with gift aid.

Nor is the lottery much of a tax. The operator, Camelot, raised £4.77 billion in 2004-05, of which it and the retailers shared equally the last 10 per cent: £477 million. The Inland Revenue, over the same period, raised £380 billion at a cost of less than 1 per cent of the money raised.

“Wealth in the hands of the many, not the few,” as Gordon Brown put it when he launched the tax-exempt Child Trust Fund in 2003: we were told that, on top of the Government’s original £500 contribution for poorer families, saving just £10 per month could amount to a tidy sum after 18 years. Funnily enough, that’s a shade less than the average low-income household wastes on the National Lottery now. Even Tessa Jowell has admitted that “players” are “often spending their most marginal income”. But, playing the Sheriff of Nottingham to Brown’s Robin Hood, she added: “But against that, we’ve also seen more millionaires created.”

Drop into any post office at the end of a week, and you’ll see the pitiable brethren of lottery “players”. No statistics are available for what proportion of lottery revenue is recycled directly from welfare cheques, but it looks like a handy cashback scheme for the Government — provided you ignore the vastly wasteful bureaucracy that has sprung up to administer the whole scam, like the ecosystem around a sewage leak.

What about good causes such as, er, the Dome? The Department for Culture, Media and Sport trumpets £17 billion spent on these since 1994. This means more than £60 billion shelled out by suckers; £30 billion returned to a lucky few, less a large amount for unclaimed prizes; which means more than £3 billion each to Camelot and to retailers, and more than £7 billion for the Treasury. The Chancellor grins and bears it. It pays for the bread and circuses, or health and education, depending on whom you believe.

Last week Ms Jowett and Mr Caborn’s colleague David Lammy unveiled plans to mark the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in Britain. He paid lavish tribute to the memory of William Wilberforce and announced a lottery grant of £16 million towards celebrations. Perhaps no one has told Mr Lammy that, once he had finished with the slave trade, Wilberforce turned his sights on what he regarded as the next social evil: you guessed it. In 1808 the lottery was described by a parliamentary committee as “radically vicious”, and it was finally abolished in 1826.

The resurrection of the National Lottery in 1994 by John Major’s Government was regressive. It belongs to the England of Hogarth and Gillray, of Gin Lane and the South Sea Bubble. As with widespread political corruption, just because other countries do it does not mean that we should.

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