IF THE Government were a nanny, as some maintain, she would be a confusing old boot. She scolds you to eat your fruit and veg, berates you for getting tubby and enjoins exercise; but she prefers this to be in expensive leisure centres rather than out on the rough old football field that she sold to the developer. She rails against binge drinking yet has friendly arrangements with chain pubs. She is cosy with her European friends, but doesn’t care whether you learn French or not. She abhors smoking and private cars, but stretches a point for her motor racing friend, Bernie.

You’re never quite sure how Nanny wants you to treat your pets. She gets furious if you let dogs chase foxes across the countryside, but seems unconcerned about the squalid treatment of intensively farmed animals. She is in some ways very modern, implacably opposed to smacking and always willing to listen to grievances about people being mean to you and threatening your “self-esteem”. Yet she runs some grim prisons, and starts wars with insouciance. She flirts enthusiastically with khaki (Nanny is marrying one of the guard, a soldier’s life is terribly hard) but her military boyfriend seems to be losing patience because he does all her dirty work for very little payback.

As for pocket money, you can’t work out what Nanny wants at all. She nags you to save for a rainy day, then raids your piggy-bank. She urges responsibility and tells you to work until you’re 70, but then you wake up one morning and find that she has installed a high-prize fruit machine in the nursery, and with a leer and a wink she encourages you to play for high stakes. When you have duly emptied your piggy-bank, through the nursery door you spot a seedy-looking man with his hat on the back of his head counting out grubby fivers into Nanny’s outstretched hand. Noticing your wide little eyes, she taps her nose and growls: “Inner-city regeneration. Culture, see? Go to bed.” The jar on the mantelpiece containing her own pension savings grows ever heavier. But before you can say anything, Nanny is on her high horse, scolding you for financial improvidence.

I am not alone in feeling bafflement at the proposed Gambling Bill. Frank Field MP, who knows a great deal about poverty, welfare and addiction, says that Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, is “off her rocker” if she thinks she’ll get it through. The Salvation Army, which knows even more, is horrified. If the Bill passes, giant Las Vegas-style “regional” casinos will let anybody walk in off the street, without current fussy membership rules, and play slot machines offering jackpots of up to a million pounds. The Australian experience is instructive: they eased their regulations seven years ago, and now have the highest level of problem gamblers per capita in the world, losing thousands a year on just such high-rolling machines, nicknamed “pokies”. Bankruptcy, suicide and family disaster follow the “pokie” habit — charities in Australia say that those who can least afford it are losing up to $12,000 a year.

“Addiction” is an unpopular word with the trade, and with its new friend, Ms Jowell; but there are measurable physical surges associated with such quick-result, skill-free gambling. Professor Mark Griffiths, the UK’s leading expert on the subject, says that there are around 325,000 problem gamblers in Britain already and that this figure may rise by two to four times if this “modernisation” goes through. One major player, MGM Mirage, has forecast that in a few years time 10 per cent of its global profits will come from Britain. That is big money. Our money.

There are other astonishing signs that Nanny is cracking up with the excitement of discovering gambling. While opening a savings account has become nightmarishly complicated, and respectable octogenarians are ordered to prove their identity to the bank manager who has known them for 30 years, we are told that to smooth the path of the casino industry the Government is “looking at” ways to exempt it from European money-laundering laws. But the sheer social effect of expansion is the main concern: gambling is another drug, another glittering route to misery, violence, and family poverty. Michael Winner relates in his autobiography how his mother careered downhill, losing £8 million of her money and his, and now observes: “People get swept away very easily. Many families will be destroyed by this”. However, return to Australia and note that government revenues from gambling tax have almost doubled since they changed the law and you can see why they did it.

And you can see why our “Culture” Secretary is so pliable to lobbyists. The Bill, claiming to be merely an updating of gambling law to protect children from internet gambling and the like, in effect opens the door to a vast US industry: to flashing, glinting casino complexes that will not “regenerate” rundown city centres and make them glamorous. They will turn them into machines that suck money from those who already have least to live for, and send it to the Treasury and to American conglomerates.

But I do admit that protective nonconformist nannies are not everyone’s cup of tea. There is an old-fashioned Darwinian conservative argument that you can’t legislate for virtue; that few private vices need regulation; that life is a jungle; and that citizens should be allowed to wreck themselves freely on drink, drugs, weird sex, stupidity, diving off bridges on faulty bungees, eating monster cheeseburgers or gambling away the children’s tea. “Serve them right for being so damn stupid,” says the laissez-faire tendency. It is at least a coherent philosophy.

But it isn’t Nanny’s usual line, and it isn’t what we hired her for in 1997. And the really worrying thing is that she only favours the hell-in-a-handcart option when there’s money in it for her. Tuck a fiver down that starched pinny, and she’s anybody’s.

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