My background is that I was the Shadow Gambling Minister not once but twice, in 2000-01, then 2003 to 2004. Then I was a very active member of the Standing Committee that did the line-by-line, clause-by-clause scrutiny on what became the Gambling Act 2005. Because I was then the most recent Shadow Gambling Minister, but was going to return to law and not contest the ‘05 election, I was asked by my colleagues to act as an unofficial extra opposition spokesman on that Committee, but with the freedom and flexibility to be more ‘free market’ which suited me more than the official party line, even then. Since my departure from the House, most of the people I worked with most closely on these issues are no longer on the opposition Front bench, and the party has departed much further from the free market I believe in!

For the last year and a half I’ve been specialising on gambling law in the City, first with a three-partner niche firm and now with a national firm’s leisure services group.

It was less of a surprise to anyone like myself who has crossed the divide from the political to the legal world, that as soon as Gordon Brown became Prime Minister he would want to change things in this field, than perhaps it seemed to the media.

On the same day as his ‘mini Queen’s speech’ announcing 15 new Bills on such major matters as crime, pensions, health and anti-terrorism, Gordon Brown decided to brief his aides to tell the media not about those, but that “the supercasino is ‘dead in the water’ “. The deliberate intention was that this would be “the story” next day, to mark a difference from the perceived “Blair pro-gambling era”. It is all part of the spin that “Brown is different and new and has his much vaunted ‘moral compass’ “. The major newspapers and main broadcasters dutifully followed this line; they ‘decided’ that this news about supercasinos was much more important than anything in these 15 new pieces of legislation! That’s why it captured the headlines.

You’d expect a former Conservative Shadow Minister to disagree with what a Labour

Government says, but anyone in the industry should understand this is about pure politics. This is about what Gordon Brown and his advisers decided was going to catch the attention of the media, what would be most dramatic and mark the break from the Blair era most clearly. It’s politics, it’s not about the merits of the issue. Of course, one of the reasons why the politics of this issue ‘works’, is that everybody knows Brown is making a huge point about being different from Blair and it’s very much in his interests to do so in terms of establishing himself. He’s seized on an issue which will appeal to Daily Mail readers, who he is desperate to have voting for him in large numbers, as many of them did for Blair, rather than voting Conservative.

Of course, it was no surprise that the ‘Daily Mail’, having led the crusade against the original proposals and caused the first lot of changes in government policy while the Bill which became the 2005 Gambling Act was still in its Standing Committee, on which I sat, should seize on this further change. It was slightly more surprising that the rest of the media should follow suit and decide ‘this is the big news’, but there is always a ‘herd instinct’ with the major media, and the success of this piece of Brown spin was worthy of Alastair Campbell at his most effective!

The reason I say this is surprising is that very little proper analysis was made in the coverage of the fact that these ‘changes’ were not as significant as first suggested, because when Gordon Brown was instructing his aides to brief the media that the supercasino was ‘dead in the water ‘– that did not mean the Government were not going to go ahead with the eight large and eight small casinos.

So you have 17 new venues planned, and 16 are almost certain to go ahead –(or most of them, anyway). The fig leaf of course is that Gordon Brown has said : “we’re going to ask the relevant local authorities if they still want to go ahead with the casinos, as they might have had a change of political control or a change of mind”. It’s possible that one or two might change their minds, but I think it’s very likely, because these new large and small casinos are still going to be great revenue earners, that most local authorities will want to proceed with them. If out of the 17, 16 still proceed that’s nothing like as big a change of approach as the media is being led to persuade the public is really happening!

A lot more of this is about the ‘mood music’ of a Prime Minister who wants to prove he is different, and with the background being that it is well known that Gordon Brown is a ‘son of the Manse’, and is therefore, in terms of his personal feelings, likely to be less sympathetic towards gambling than the Blair/Jowell regime, that is hardly surprising.

Long before Brown took over it had been clearly signalled there were likely to be changes, but I believe James Purnell, as the new Secretary of State, DCMS (Department of Culture, Media and Sport), is going to be far less hostile to the industry than the Brown ‘mood music’. He has always had a reputation, from when he was an aide in Number 10, then as a backbench MP, then as a Junior Spokesman, as being far more sympathetic to the leisure industry than Brown.

So I suspect that when we finally see the result of all this, the only big change may be that there may be no ‘supercasino’ – or at least, not for some time. That would be a great shame in my view, as I wanted there to be a free market. It may only be industry magazines like Casino International that report this; the national media may want to leave the public with the impression Gordon Brown has changed things massively.

There is also the issue of the suggestion that some of the opportunities for advertising of internet gambling might be changed yet further but it’s too early to tell whether Brown saying ‘we’re going to review those’ means anything, beyond the recently-announced, industry-agreed voluntary code, or not. My instinct is that James Purnell is sufficiently sympathetic enough to the legitimate leisure industry that he will not want to change anything too substantially, particularly when the Gambling Commission and the DCMS has spent two-and-a-half years working on this. A sensible Government doesn’t want all of that work to be wasted and everything turned upside-down, particularly bearing in mind that all of this is happening during summer Parliamentary Recess, and the 2005 Act is due to come into force while Parliament is still in Recess. If the Government were going to change things in a major way, they would have to have changed it fairly dramatically in August, when many of the Ministers and officials are on holiday.

My personal view is that not a lot will actually change; especially now Brown has got the headlines he wanted, and public perception of his attitude to this issue has been ‘groomed’ in the way he desired. However, there will be a further spasm of media coverage when the Government-commissioned ‘prevalence study’ is released-doubtless the ‘Mail’ will continue to argue we are in Sodom and Gomorrah with gambling.

In addition, if and when the media calms down a little, if Manchester doesn’t get the supercasino as was recommended by the CAP (Casino Advisory Panel), we might end up with a mild re-jigging of things and see two slightly smaller operations, one in Manchester, one in Blackpool. Who knows?

The Government have been deliberately vague about exactly what James Purnell is reviewing, and this is not an accident, nor because it was being considered just before Parliament rose for the summer Recess. James Purnell has been deliberately freed to make the right noises to his long-time friends in the leisure industry and reassure them that the Brown announcements don’t really mean that much in the long run, except of course to Manchester. They do now have some Labour leaders in Manchester who must be very angry, and feeling they have been ‘sold up the river’ by their own political friends in London (at least, I would if I were in that position!). That’s the only thing that’s really happened and the only real decision that’s been announced.

The detail will come from Purnell. As long as Purnell knows that he has a general mandate, that he can do what he thinks is appropriate as long as he doesn’t frighten the horses, and he doesn’t undermine what Brown is trying to do with his aides to placate Daily Mail readers, he will be fine.

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