Betting Pub

The Betting and Gaming Act in Britain

More than a decade have gone since Britain's Betting and Gaming Act changed the law of the land.

Since then, if the anti-gambling factions are to be believed - the country has been gripped by betting fever; but the truth of the matter is that reliable statistics are hard to come by.

The figures put out by reformers are intended as propaganda and are thus tendentious.

They should not be taken too seriously by the representatives of New York State and City concerned with the effects of legalizing off-track gambling in Britain.

Anybody with experience of British life would probably agree that the vast majority of adult British men and women are, and have long been, petty gamblers, sacrificing most of their energy and waking thoughts and financial resources to their passion.

On the other side, there is another minority, again probably small, which is passionately opposed to gambling on what it considers to be religious or ethical grounds.

It is hard to find passages in the Scriptures which specifically condemn gambling - although there are passages condemning usury or the taking of interest on money loaned.

This puritan minority, probably chiefly nonconformist in its religion and chiefly middle-class, is both energetic and vocal, providing most of the scarifying figures which suggest that a large proportion of British money is squandered on gambling.

But even if these figures are accurate - and there is little reason to suppose they are better than guesstimates - they are, intentionally or not, grossly misleading.

They take no account of the gambler's winnings. Suppose, for example, a man gambles one pound a week on the football pools with a five-to-one chance of winning and wins once every five weeks.

You can then calculate that the man is spending 52 pounds a year on gambling. This will be the sum he has put into the pools and the amount which will be quoted in the anti-gambling figures.

But in point of fact, he has a revolving sum of six pounds, and if the odds are correctly calculated, he will have the same amount of money at the end of the year as he had at the beginning.

The odds, of course, are not correctly calculated but favor the bookmaker and, even more, the pools promoter; but for the majority of the British working classes, this picture of a relatively small sum in continuous circulation is a closer approximation to the facts than the picture of 10 percent of workers' wages being squandered weekly.