Before leaving Britain, I lived in an area that had a ~50% poverty rate. The number of betting shops, small and large brands, just on the local high street alone was ridiculous. It reduced somewhat as gambling has moved online, however there is clearly still money to be made in bricks and mortar gambling.
Betting shops have begun to disappear not just because of moving online, but because regulations have finally limited the pernicious power of the fixed-odds betting terminal (FOBT). They were so disgustingly, vampirically profitable they were reason alone to open betting shops in small premises; two members of staff and four FOBTs and any small shop rakes it in. Now they finally do not make enough profit for that to be worth it.
Oddly, betting shops aren't in any planning categories and AFAIK never have been, so whenever you see one, it was specifically and individually approved. Which should tell you a thing or two about the uncomfortable overlap between small-scale commercial landlords and councillors.
> Which should tell you a thing or two about the uncomfortable overlap between small-scale commercial landlords and councillors.
Hah, like in my town, where they are so in bed with each other their families and kids go on vacation together.
And then they approve waterfront developments on the side of hills that failed ecological testing and failed traffic assessments (in this case that the local roads could not support the traffic load -and- because of the topology there was no room to increase traffic capacity and the closest you'd be able to do would be eminent-domain'ing ~200 homes to widen a road out to an arterial, for the benefit of the 450 new units. I'd better not give them ideas...)
And the local newspaper is so in bed with both that when this approval was announced, the article in the paper mentioned all the opponents by name, got a tepid comment from the town, but couldn't bring themselves once to name the developer (You can find out who it is of course, but the newspaper won't help you, even while publishing their artists renderings).
Except that — and I say this as a centre-left sort of person — almost none of this is the Conservatives' fault. Essentially all of the UK's gambling hellscape was triggered by massive deregulation by Tony Blair's first New Labour government from 1997, and subsequent governments have struggled to undo it.
UK political donations big enough to win a campaign used to be quite hard to come by. The big single donor money was in alcohol, tobacco or gambling.
(The big single-donor money now, clearly, is crypto, though the tories take vape industry money.)
Alcohol industry giants like Diageo tend to be politically neutral because they know that really any government could change the law on health grounds. The tobacco giants, at the time, wanted to hold back inevitable regulatory change and backed the Tories — Maggie Thatcher had been a Philip Morris consultant.
That left Blair talking to wealthy donors from the gambling industry pushing for widespread deregulation of a modernised, increasingly digital industry. He took the cash where the Tories would not.
Successive governments have been trying to claw back from what that decision (combined with a subsequent gambling taxation change) caused. Long term, it has been worse for the UK than any other single Blair policy and it has fully undone many community and health policies he introduced because it allowed the creation of the Fixed Odds Betting Terminal (FOBT), for example: a development so rapacious and predatory it makes drug dealers look like amateurs.
It has been very difficult to undo because the deregulation was so massive in scope, and as tobacco tax revenue collapsed after Blair's broadly successful tobacco regulation, the government became increasingly dependent on enormous gambling tax revenue to replace it (including, specifically, FOBT tax revenue).
So as much as I would like to blame the Tory government that followed for not doing enough — and they did not do enough, even when presented with clear evidence of FOBT harm — their hands were mostly tied.
Not surprising. Brits loooove lotteries. On every scale. My year abroad in the UK, in every social event I attended organized by a student society there would inevitably be left-over budget, which would be taken care of by.. a raffle. Some of these raffles could take 30 min (on an event that lasted ~3 hours). And people would be incredibly excited about it.. Really boggles my mind
I would be wary of generalising from British student society culture to wider British culture.
But we would (IMO correctly) observe that while raffles and lotteries are both technically a form of gambling, a raffle is not really a lottery in the conventional sense; it tends to form a more specific social function because there's usually an array of cheap, fun, often slightly absurd prizes from local donors, the prize is not money or a truly high-value thing, they aren't rolling, weekly events, they tend to be all-ages etc.
It largely emerges out of British church fête culture. British churches are usually poor, not rich, so a raffle was a way for the vicar to gently shake down local businesses for a set of cheap prizes in return for some gentle advertising and showing off, and a way to get more local small donors and word-of-mouth because you're gently socially shamed into taking and distributing a book of raffle tickets. School communities do it — for much the same reason — just substitute head teacher for vicar.
Also the raffle is at the end of the event, so people stay to the end (when Britishness would otherwise see us leaving early)!
You have to understand that the naffness of a raffle is very distinct from the brassy, brash idea of a lottery. People groan at the naffness and then take part anyway because it's harmless. Raffles are crap, but they are community crap.
(Like the old-fashioned "Beetle drive" fundraiser which is essentially a form of bingo.)
You can't really draw a line from the typical social raffle to lottery participation or gambling. Lotteries, raffles, bingo halls, sports betting, online game gambling, all look superficially similar but they aren't (despite the gambling companies' efforts) really the same constituencies.
Apart from that, I don't think we're any different to the USA or European countries; we got our National Lottery tradition from the USA and some of our smaller prize lottery companies have been European.
Thank you for the additional background! For me as a foreigner coming into the raffle culture, I have no such community associations with the raffles and consider the "naffness" rather more obnoxious. Once I found out that it basically was a staple at these social events, I would act British and leave early ;). That it is related to Church Fete makes the conversative party <-> lottery link all the less surprising!
We do have a rather unusual relationship with naffness in this country! It's very difficult to explain :-)
New Zealand also has the same sort of church/community raffle culture, I gather; very much an export.
The Conservatives did start the National Lottery in the 90s and it definitely tried to hang off the "good causes" thing, but as I detailed in another overlong comment, much of the UK's more disturbing gambling trends were caused by subsequent deregulations enacted by the subsequent (New) Labour government.
It also explains the UK representatives for Eurovision in the last.. say 25 years (except Sam Rider in 2022). I've wondered if e.g. this year's very very naff send-in (Eins, Zwei, Drei (although, that was not an R)) was a deliberate attempt at an FU to the eurovision, or rather a genuine attempt that would speak to the populace. I'm leaning towards the latter now.
Not a deliberate FU, for sure. Sam Battle simply would not do that. I thought it was both fun and funny. But it was earnest and playful at the same time.
For us Eurovision is simply not something that registers as a serious thing; the years where it has been non-cheesy are few and far between. As a nation we find much (non-scandinavian, at least) Europop quite cheesy, with only a couple of exceptions.
Winning it earnestly is not something that happens when we try, and perhaps will not ever happen again. Europeans simply don't like us enough!
The last time we won was a rare moment in our recent history; literally two days before, a Europhile left-wing government led by a prime minister who spoke French fluently and counted a legendary flamenco guitarist as his friend had just won a landslide, and we entered a band that had already been famous with a pretty basic, stadium rock song. So it was a combination of happenstance and European proxy politics again.
So we enter fun things that better express how we feel about it. Europop often comes across as cheesy but the LMNC entry was out of love for it, not loathing.
We would, TBH, rather win it for something fun like this than win it for something serious. And I think Ireland shows you what happens if you train the big guns on the thing; repeatedly winning Eurovision nearly bankrupted RTÉ, as far as I recall.
FWIW my feeling is that we should quit Eurovision (if the EBU do not end it). Its time has past and it will not survive its current form.
The way that gambling companies target the poorest of society feels disgustingly predatory.
You can often tell the average income of an area based on how many betfreds and paddy powers there are on the high street.