The formal Order to implement this still has to go through the House of Lords, and even at this late stage a Lords Committee, the Select Committee on the Merits of Statutory Instruments, has criticised it! However, I think this time it will go through. When these new casinos are finally built – and there are now suggestions that most won’t open till 2011 – will they actually make any major difference to gambling in the UK, as the anti-gambling lobby suggest? I very much doubt it. Other than in the towns where they will be built, I doubt if anyone will notice.

Talking of the anti-gambling media lobby, it gave me huge pleasure to read of the Daily Mail having to apologise personally and publicly to Sheldon Adelson, Chairman of Las Vegas Sands, and to the company, and pay damages reported to be in the region of £4 million, (then passed on to the Royal Marsden Hospital) and unreservedly withdraw all the false allegations they made against him. It would be lovely to think that, as a result of this, the Mail journalists would think twice before writing and printing vicious and unsubstantiated anti-gambling stories in future… time will tell!

On a less happy note, I think that when the different parts of this industry fight against one another like ferrets in a sack it is very unhelpful to efforts to make a case to Government Ministers, civil servants and the media. There is a very serious danger that Ministers (and even more significantly, the civil servants who may advise a succession of Ministers) will simply say, in effect, “a plague on all your houses”. In recent times we have seen an unedifying squabble over money between Gamcare and RIGT – happily, this now seems, at the time of writing, to be on the way to being resolved – and arcades not supporting the case put by bingo, and other sectors attacking casinos.
However, there is, apparently, money to be made! Different bidders are being touted in the press, both general and specialist business press, for Rank, and the Plimsoll report analysis of the gaming industry apparently says that there is plenty of cash for acquisitions available within the top 400 or so gaming companies in the industry. Less attractive news is the suggestion that there are about 350 gambling industry companies which are “failing” and could well go to the wall (if not snapped up and able to be ‘turned around’). I wonder how many of the latter are small one- or two-venue Bingo hall operators, who the Government so conspicuously refused to help in Chancellor Darling’s budget, keeping the outrageous anomaly that bingo alone of all sectors, already so hard hit by the smoking ban, is taxed twice.
It is suggested, now that the Treasury has failed to assist the industry, that the DCMS might do what is within its power, and perhaps agree to bring forward from 2009 to this year its review of stakes and prize levels for machines. This would be most welcome, but lobbying should still continue on the “double taxation” anomaly. The Government is under pressure from its own backbenchers to do something to assist bingo. However, the current “credit crunch” does not make it easy for them to show flexibility in any field.

Just before writing , I noticed my old cross-party friend Gerry Sutcliffe MP had weakened his position in terms of cross-departmental negotiations with the Treasury on gambling matters, by getting into trouble over what he said to the “Morning Advertiser” on alcohol matters. Appearing to sympathise publicly with the licensed trade’s complaints about the Chancellor’s Budget decisions (I think you had every right to be upset) was not a wise career move. At least it was only having to make a public, if peculiar, retraction: “what I said is not a true reflection of my views…” (Americans like Hillary Clinton say “I misspoke”, but poor Gerry might have been under politically all-too-real “sniper fire” from 11 Downing St! ). As one well-known “celebrity” boozer and smoker, former Test cricket spin bowler often says: “Oh well, Happy Days!”

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