Take from the poor to give to the rich
... that's New Labour's super-casino plan 

Nick Cohen, Sunday March 19, 2006, The Observer 

In 2004, before her Italian connection became an
embarrassment, Tessa Jowell dismissed opponents of New
Labour's plans to let gambling rip as modern
aristocrats determined to stifle the masses'
pleasures. 'There's a whiff of snobbery in some of the
opposition to new casinos,' she told the Telegraph.
Her critics wanted to keep casinos as 'the preserve of
the rich' and turn away 'the big investment that will
come from the United States'.

Unlike the snobs, she cared about poverty and was
determined to use casino money to regenerate the
slums. Top of the government's list was Blackpool, a
resort whose dearest friends have to admit is sorely
in need of a stroke of good fortune. Package holidays
and cheap flights hit it as hard as cheap clothing
imports hit the Lancashire mill towns that once
supplied its tourists.
Unemployment, long-term sickness, failing schools and
crime have followed and left Blackpool a wretched
place. Seaside towns have always been melancholy
places out of season; Blackpool can depress you in
high summer.

The attraction of using gambling to turn it into the
Las Vegas of the north west is obvious and virtually
every press report says that Blackpool is the front
runner in the race to host the pilot project for
super-casinos. Given what it has been through, you
would need to be a flint-hearted moralist to say it
shouldn't have the chance to make money.

Yet, to date, it is far from clear if the casino will
give money to Blackpool or Blackpool give money to the
casino. A study by the Hall Aitken consultancy
predicted that a super-casino would merely take jobs
from rival tourist attractions. What jobs it created
would probably go to east Europeans.

This seems a poor recompense for the public money
Blackpool has staked already. Steven Bate, a Liberal
Democrat councillor, and one of the few in the local
political establishment who believes Blackpool is
prostituting itself, has kept a record of the
corporate welfare the council is offering. It is
promising to compulsorily purchase the land for the
casino, which is currently occupied by the police
station and law courts.

In a sign of the times, the council will agree to
demolish public buildings that once embodied law and
order to clear the ground for a gambling den and then
spend public money on new homes for the police and
judges. It gets better. The council already has spent
public money on designing the new casino and finding a
developer to put it up.

In the age of globalisation, we've seen governments
offer tax breaks and other sweeteners to entice
multinationals to move to their countries, but I've
never heard of public money being used to give casino
capitalists a casino.

The reason why Blackpool has to pay out gets to the
heart of the delusion behind New Labour's thinking.
It's not the scale of the poverty that puts the casino
operators off the town, but that Blackpool's poverty
is not great enough. A report for John Prescott's
office, released last week, said the super-casino
operators wanted to be in city centres, and you can
see why. Each hopes to lure about one million people a
year to play on the 2,000 or so fruit machines.

The infinitesimally small chance of winning the £1m
jackpots Jowell is allowing them to offer are meant to
keep the punters pumping in the pound coins.
Blackpool, like most seaside towns, is too far from
the big centres of population to provide enough poor,
addicted, desperate or foolish gamblers to allow the
casinos to operate seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.

What they need are punters who can jump on a bus on a
winter weekday, not holidaymakers who disappear in
September. Las Vegas is the exception to the norm.
Across the world, most money is taken by casinos that
are close to their customers.

With a frankness which is unusual for management
consultants, Prescott's advisers warned that New
Labour was offering casinos a 'licence to print money'
and risked bringing more 'crime and antisocial
behaviour' to city centres. The experience of
Australia and the United States shows that they are
right. There are hundreds of studies to back them up.
One of the most comprehensive was by Professor Earl L
Grinols from the University of Illinois, who worked
out that super-casinos rely on addicts for between a
third and a half of their revenues.

Letting gambling rip meant letting gambling addiction
rip and brought with it assaults, rapes, robberies,
larceny, burglary, car theft, embezzlement, fraud,
lost productivity, unemployment, bankruptcy, anxiety,
depression, heart attacks, wife beating, child
neglect, child abuse and suicide. He added them up and
estimated that problem gambling in the US cost about
as $54bn a year.

If you believe that people should be free to spend
their money how they choose, then you will doubtless
shrug your shoulders and say these prices are worth
paying.

Still, even the most committed libertarian should
retain a sense of the ironies of political history and
marvel at the spectacle of the Labour party
encouraging the poor to redistribute what wealth they
have to the rich.

An Italian lesson we shouldn't learn
The police objected to Tessa Jowell's casinos because
they feared their roulette tables would be a money
launderer's dream. A drug dealer could convert his
wads of notes into chips, put half on black and half
on red then convert the chips back into clean money.

The 'loans' to New Labour and the Conservatives from
the super-rich go through a more upmarket, legal,
laundry than a casino, but the effect is the same and
unpleasant stains are washed away. Because big
'lenders' can remain anonymous, the 'loans' escape
unwelcome media attention. If, as so often happens,
they are nominated for a peerage, the Lords
Appointments Commission need not know about the
financial connection, either. And if, as also happens,
the ennobled 'lender' says months later that he
doesn't want his money back, well, there may be a
small fuss in the press, but it will be too late to
make a difference.

Westminster journalists see the Brown-Blair rivalry
behind everything that moves in the Labour party.
They, therefore, explained away Jack Dromey's rather
magnificent outburst against the corruption of his
party as a Brownite attack on Blair. Maybe I'm being
naïve, but it is just possible that the Labour
treasurer is a reasonably decent man who was genuinely
shocked that peerages were for sale. Perhaps he
sincerely thought that property developers and
stockbrokers did not have the best interests of the
centre-left at heart, and his anger at £14m in soft
money sloshing around without his knowledge was real.

What I do know is that other reasonably decent people,
who couldn't give a fig about the Brownite-Blairite
rivalry, hate the Italianisation of British politics
and will refuse to lend Labour their votes.


Special report 
Gambling
Gambling Act 2005, UK Gambling Commission, Gamblers
Anonymous
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 

-------------------
Problems/Questions? Send it to Listserv owner: [log in to unmask]


To unsubscribe, send the following message in the text section -- NOT the subject header --  to [log in to unmask]
SIGNOFF SDOH

DO NOT SEND IT BY HITTING THE REPLY BUTTON. THIS SENDS THE MESSAGE TO THE ENTIRE LISTSERV AND STILL DOES NOT REMOVE YOU.

To subscribe to the SDOH list, send the following message to [log in to unmask] in the text section, NOT in the subject header.
SUBSCRIBE SDOH yourfirstname yourlastname

To post a message to all 1000+ subscribers, send it to [log in to unmask]
Include in the Subject, its content, and location and date, if relevant.

For a list of SDOH members, send a request to [log in to unmask]

To receive messages only once a day, send the following message to [log in to unmask]
SET SDOH DIGEST

To view the SDOH archives, go to: https://listserv.yorku.ca/archives/sdoh.html