[rorylawless]

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.

[dofm]

New Labour did that with gambling deregulation.

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.

[FireBeyond]

> 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).

And