Personally if I had several million quid and a football stadium sized space earmarked for use as a public entertainment venue I’d build a football stadium, but then there’s no accounting for taste. Nonetheless, a super-casino seems to be the next best thing you can do with it.
For some reason a lot of people seem to disagree with this point of view. Outrage splashed across the media, screams from public groups and the usual rants from Canterbury have accompanied the plans.
You might have noticed it’s tough to read anything about casinos, especially the super variety (although they’re all super really) without some self righteous holier-than-thou guardian of your soul telling you that they are a quantifiably bad thing. People are going to become repetitive automatons doing nothing but spending their wages on slots, roulette and blackjack just because, godammit, they can.
There is just seemingly no end of bandwagon-jumping moralists looking out for the poor moronic working classes who, you would think reading their arguments, are clearly incapable of resisting temptation and all must have addictive personalities.
This whole attitude is ridiculous. According to the Bishop of Hulme there is, and I quote, “evidence to suggest that actually gambling addiction follows the development of casinos.” I would expect so. It’s like suggesting that a mail order crack-cocaine-delivered-to-your-door service wouldn’t increase the number of drug users. It doesn’t mean we’ll all do it though, and those who do will be able to walk out at any time, quite unlike a crack addiction. Casinos normally do have doors.
Listening to the religious community urging us to rush out and stop poor souls from spending their last tenner of food money on the slots would be hilariously funny if it wasn’t so worrying. Surely in a free society it is to the citizen to decide how their money is spent? As long as everyone knows where they stand, the casinos and surrounding areas are well policed and punters well informed, it’s a personal decision.
The fact that religious zealots and media hacks trying to find a story have managed to curtail the government’s planned development of more casinos is a disgrace. There are enough places in the country that desperately need employment and regeneration. Some members of the Blackpool team which failed in its proposal to host the first (and I hope it is the first and not the only) super-casino are now predicting a serious worsening of the economic situation. Why? Because some moralist Mirror reader thinks that people are unable to make their own decisions.
This government has enforced some of the strictest rules possible on these casinos. There are not to be any tricks of the trade, no pumped oxygen to keep the punters punting. No cheating, this’ll be real clean odds gambling, not Vegas falsities.
The most important thing that they can do now is to make absolutely sure that those who want to gamble are fully educated on the subject and well informed. From there on in, it’s their choice.
People can get addicted to gambling, yes. They can also become addicted to alcohol but we still deliver it to their door. The publics individual foibles are also their little pleasures; it just depends on how you look at them. Nobody is going to beat the casino, not in the long term. Nobody is going to able to earn a living punting on long odds bets and it is not possible to turn dole money or child support into millions, certainly not with any consistency.
People will try. Week in and week out people will try. Some of them will win and blow their winnings again. Some will become addicted. Some will unquestionably ruin their lives. But for every person who does that hundreds will be taken off the dole and given a job, the chance to earn some money to decide, themselves and without outside moralistic interference, what to do with it.
It is good to see a government that has been increasingly infringing on people’s individual privileges and rights in the name of security and the public good to realize the financial and economical advantages to a situation rather than take a knee-jerk moralistic reaction.
It’s not what Blair wants to be remembered for, but it is a good move.
