The Gambling Establishment

Challenging the Power of the Modern Gambling Industry and its Allies

Jim Orford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429632594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

There are now signs that, after decades of phenomenal growth, the era of unrestrained gambling liberalisation may be coming to an end. However, the power of the Gambling Establishment is formidable, and it will certainly fight back. Drawing on research and policy examples from around the world, the book provides a unified understanding of the dangerousness of modern commercialised gambling, how its expansion has been deliberately or inadvertently supported, and how the backlash is now occurring.

The term Gambling Establishment is defined to include the industry which sells gambling, governments which support it, and a wider network of organisations and individuals who have subscribed to the 'responsible gambling' Establishment discourse. Topics covered include the psychology of how gambling is now being advertised and promoted and the way it is designed to deceive gamblers about their chances of winning; the increased exposure of young people to gambling and the alignment of gambling with sport; understanding the experience of gambling addiction; the various public health harms of gambling at individual, family, community and societal levels; and how evidence has been used to resist change. The book's final chapter offers the author's manifesto for policy change, designed with Britain particularly in mind but likely to have relevance elsewhere.

With detailed examples given of the ways a number of countries are responding to these threats to their citizens' health, this book will be of global interest for academics, researchers, policymakers and service providers in the field of gambling or other addictions specifically, and public health and social policy generally.

1
The new backlash against the growth of commercial gambling

In Poland in 2009 several very senior politicians, including the Deputy Prime Minister and Ministers for Sport and for Justice, resigned over the issue. In 2010 the Australian federal Government nearly fell because of it. And in 2018 the UK’s Minister for Sport resigned for the same reason. What was the issue that had become so political in those three very different countries and in so many others too? The answer is gambling. More accurately, the failure of governments to protect their citizens from the late 20th and early 21st centuries’ expansion of commercial gambling.

Gambling is now no longer gambling as we once knew it. The many ways in which gambling can be offered online and the much more sophisticated and high-powered gambling machines – both taking full advantage of technological changes – are among the most obvious ways in which gambling has been transformed in a remarkably short period of time. The much greater diversity of sports betting, the opportunity to gamble on numerous events 24 hours a day, the constant advertisements and inducements to gamble, the greater size of lottery and bingo jackpots, and the rise of betting exchanges, spread betting and personal ‘trading’ are amongst other features of this changed world of gambling. Country after country, jurisdiction after jurisdiction, has been seduced by the money to be made.

The drive for this expansion and transformation has come from the profit-making industry itself and from governments which have put financial gain first and made protection of the public a lower priority. The public’s view has not often been heard, and when occasionally it has been heard it is overruled by the powerful forces of what now amounts to a Gambling Establishment. In the words of one academic colleague, from New Zealand, ‘gambling has moved from being a dispersed cottage industry to a high-volume consumer enterprise – an industrial revolution on a worldwide scale’ (Adams, 2016).

If one examines how this transformation came about, one thing that stands out is the opposition to the expansion of gambling which was always evident and which had to be overcome. Gambling has always been controversial. Citizens, and frequently their leaders, have always been aware of the harm that gambling can cause. A number of witnesses to gambling in the final decades of the 20th century predicted a counteraction to growing liberalisation. One went so far as to say, of gambling in the USA, ‘The 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century will be the final boom. By 2029 it will be outlawed, again’ (Rose, 1991). If that is what he hoped for, he was perhaps over-optimistic, but of signs of a backlash there are now plenty from around the world.

I will begin by looking at the backlash against machine gambling, illustrating the point by reference to a number of specific countries. I will go on to look at the concerns being expressed about online gambling, particularly concerns about effects for children and young people, and the ways in which a number of countries are responding. After then considering reactions to the spread of casinos globally, I will describe the reaction against liberalised gambling which is now growing in my own country, Britain.¹

The backlash against the new generation of high-powered dangerous gambling machines

Behind the extraordinary rise in gambling internationally in just a few decades lies the ingenuity of a diverse industry whose main interest, naturally enough, is to make as much money as possible. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the EGMs, the electronic gambling machines. They were already seen as troublesome in Britain years ago in the first half of the 20th century. The Lord Chief Justice in 1927 described the slot machine as ‘a pest and a most mischievous pest’, and after World War II, the 1951 Royal Commission on Betting, Lotteries and Gaming, despite its more relaxed approach to gambling compared to earlier such reports, recommended that gaming machines should be illegal (Dixon, 1991). Similarly, the foresightful Royal Commission into Gambling in Western Australia in 1974 recommended sticking to the policy of confining gambling machines to casinos on the grounds that they required no skill or social contact and appeared to be addictive.

Little could those who made such statements years ago have anticipated the changes that would be made to EGMs in years to come. The seductive features of gambling machines of that time now look trivial compared to more recent developments. Long gone are the mechanical one-armed bandits of yesteryear, now replaced by complex electronic devices offering endless permutations of betting choices accompanied by attractive state-of-the-art visual and auditory displays. Later, in Chapter 5, we shall examine more closely the addiction potential of these dangerous inventions.

An important international review appeared in 2019 from a group of prominent experts in the field of public health whose previous summaries of international research on alcohol, for example, have been highly influential. That this group should turn its focus on gambling is itself an indication of the increased critical attention now being devoted to the subject of gambling worldwide. About EGMs they say, ‘EGMs generate much, if not most of the profit for the gambling industry, and most of the harm caused by it’ (Sulkunen et al., 2019). They point out that even casinos make most of their profit from EGMs.

Table 1.1 shows examples of countries that have taken decisions to try and reverse the trend towards increasing numbers of dangerous EGMs in accessible public areas such as bars and cafes in several European countries and pubs and clubs in Australia – what has been called ‘suburban gambling’ in Australia and ‘ambient gambling’ in the UK. Several points about the backlash in those countries are telling and help inform us about the way forward in other places including Britain.

One thing to note is that resistance has often been keenest at the local level. In Italy the lead was largely taken by an increasing number of municipalities and regions, often opposed by the national Government. For example, the Piedmont Region passed a law in 2016 that slot machines could not be placed less than 500 metres away from schools, places of worship, shops that buy gold, therapeutic communities and cash machines. In the Czech Republic, where the law governing gambling allows individual municipalities regulatory control over the availability of EGMs in their areas, and even allows them to ban machines altogether, it was reported that the option to ban machines had been taken up in more than 200 towns and villages in the Republic, and several hundred other municipalities had regulated availability, sometimes through local referenda. In Norway, too, individual cities and regions were reported to be vying at one time to be among the first to ban EGMs altogether. Also very influential have been grassroots movements. Examples are: the No Slot Movement in Italy, which includes lay and Catholic non-profit organisations and individual citizens; and several non-government organisations in the Czech Republic such as Citizens Against Gambling led by activists and ex-gamblers, and one in Norway led by Lill-Tove Bergmo whose husband was recovering from problem gambling (Borch, 2018; Rolando & Scavarda, 2018; Szczyrba et al., 2015).

Table 1.1Twenty-first century examples of countries that have taken decisions to reduce the numbers or dangerousness of electronic gambling machines (EGMs)

Norway^1	EGMs brought under state monopoly in 2003; after unsuccessful court challenges, all EGMs removed in 2007; safer machines, including setting session loss limits, reintroduced from 2009
Italy^2	Agreement in 2017 to halve the number of gambling venues nationally, including bars and tobacco shops, by the end of 2019, and to reduce the number of EGMs by 35%
Poland^3	Gambling Law of 2009 brought in tighter regulation of gambling including availability, advertising, operation of games and taxation: number of gambling venues dropped by half in the next year and low prize EGMs eliminated by 2015
Australia^4	In 2010 Government agreed EGM reform to include mandatory setting of individual loss limits; Government backtracks after industry campaigning against the reform
Czech Republic^5	In 2017 Government issued guidelines for the imposition of mandatory limits for players’ losses, requiring online and land-based operators to set maximum hourly loss limits
Russia^6	In 2006 a law passed to confine legal gambling, other than a limited number of bookmakers, betting shops and charity lotteries, to four ‘gambling zones’, each to be located at a distance from major cities

¹ Borch (2018); ² Rolando & Scavarda (2018); ³ Wieczorek & Bujalski (2018); ⁴ Adams (2016); ⁵ Casino Players Report (2017); ⁶ Vasiliev & Bernhard (2012).

Press reaction to evidence of growing gambling harm has played an important role, for example in provoking the Norwegian Government’s uniquely strong response (Borch, 2018). The press there had been increasingly critical of national gambling policy after the operation of machine gambling was opened up to humanitarian and sports organisations and commercial operators in the 1990s. In Russia, also, the change in the law followed negative media coverage of the Russian gambling industry in 2006 (Vasiliev & Bernhard, 2012).

Another point to note is the resistance such movements meet, not just from the gambling industry, but also from governments slow to institute reform. Change in Italy only occurred after lengthy negotiations with a recalcitrant national Government and in Norway only after a legal battle with the EGMs Operators’ Association. In a number of countries, a political crisis ensued in the process. In Poland, there was serious political fallout from the gambling controversy, with several Ministers resigning, accused of involvement in unofficial lobbying and serving the vested interests of the gambling industry. In Australia, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was already on record as saying in 2007, ‘I hate pokie machines’, and a few years later, following a national election that produced a hung parliament, Prime Minister Julia Gillard struck a bargain with an independent MP whose support was conditional on Government agreement to bring in mandatory pre-commitment (i.e. requiring machine gamblers to pre-set a maximum loss limit: see Chapter 9). Seeing the threat to industry interests, ClubsNSW committed up to A$40 million to oppose the reform, which funded, amongst other things, an advertising campaign entitled ‘It’s UN-Australian’. In the event, Gillard caved in to the pressure, including pressure from her own back-benchers, survived by gaining parliamentary support elsewhere, and adopted the weak alternative of slowly introducing a system of voluntary pre-commitment (Adams, 2016). In Britain, the resignation of Sports Minister Tracey Crouch in November 2018 influenced Government to relent and reduce a delay in implementing an already long-delayed decision to reduce the maximum allowed stake size on the fixed-odds type of EGMs in betting shops (more about the FOBTs later), thus forcing the Chancellor of the Exchequer to go back on a budget announcement made only a few days previously.

It is also important to note straight away that different jurisdictions do things very differently when it comes to gambling (see Chapter 2). It comes as a surprise to those who have got used to the proliferation of EGMs in easily accessible venues in their own countries, that EGMs remain illegal outside casinos in France and also in the state of Western Australia, both public gambling machine-free oases in continents that have otherwise ignored the warnings about the dangers (Bruneau et al., 2017; Marionneau & Berret, 2018).

Resistance to the uncontrolled spread of online gambling

Machine gambling figures large in the present book, but the inexorable rise of gambling has been a general phenomenon and by no means confined to one type of gambling. The other form of gambling which will crop up repeatedly is gambling online, or ‘internet gambling’, as it is often called. What used to be referred to as ‘remote gambling’ began not so very long ago when it became possible to place bets over the telephone. But since then the internet has changed everything, creating a situation in which gambling is available 24 hours a day without the need to enter a gambling venue. The first time the general public was able to gamble online is said to have been in 1995 when the International Lottery in Liechtenstein allowed lottery tickets to be purchased online (Williams et al., 2012). New companies emerged which had no ‘land-based’ gambling venues, provoking established gambling operators to expand their range of products to include online gambling. The number of online gambling sites has increased at a staggering rate year by year, from a mere handful or two in the mid-1990s to several thousands by 2010 (Banks, 2014). By then there were gambling companies operating out of over 50 different territorial jurisdictions, among the most important being Malta, Netherlands Antilles, the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory in North America, Gibraltar and the United Kingdom.

It is worth pointing out here that the internet not only makes it possible to provide, in online or virtual mode, forms of gambling such as sports betting, poker tournaments or casino games which are already familiar in land-based form. It also stimulated, and continues to give rise to, new forms and modes of gambling. Early examples included spread betting, with its origins in stock market trading, and the use of ‘betting exchanges’ where a betting intermediary such as the company Betfair brokers bets between individuals – the commercialisation of what used to be an agreement to gamble made privately by individuals without the need for a commercial intermediary. These two, still quite new, ways of gambling provide yet further illustrations of how gambling has changed and expanded in ways that make it more commercial, more global and almost certainly more dangerous.

Spread betting is particularly dangerous because, depending upon how far the result – for example the price of gold, the rise or fall of the Dow Jones or FTSE100 stock market index or the number of runs England makes against Australia in a cricket match – deviates from what is predicted and bet on, the amount lost may much exceed the original stake. At the same time it illustrates the growing fuzzy area between traditional gambling, such as betting on the outcome of a horse race, and the increasingly well-recognised ‘gambling’ facet of financial trading.

Another newish development gaining popularity around the world, particularly in the USA, where the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) has prohibited online sports betting across state borders (Matuszewski, 2014), is ‘fantasy sports betting’ in which people make bets on imaginary teams consisting of real players. Meanwhile, as we shall see, an aspect of the multi-faceted modern gambling world that is stimulating as much concern and opposition as any is the fast-growing, murky grey area between social media and gambling.

The dangers of online gambling for young people

The world has become an ever more dangerous place for young people where gambling is concerned. Indeed, it has become more dangerous for us all – which is a principal argument of this book. Mark Griffiths (e.g. 2010), a psychologist and internationally acknowledged British expert on adolescent gambling who has worked with the gambling industry and is by no means an all-out critic of gambling liberalisation, has warned about the dangers of online gambling for young people. He has made several good points about this. Online gambling, he says, because of the technology involved, poses a particular risk for young people because it so closely resembles video games, is likely to be confused with them, and is seen as fun rather than as gambling. Ideas of skill and luck are likely to be confused by children when gambling is presented in the context of a predominantly skill-based game. Gambling may become ‘normalised’ as a legitimate activity that children and adolescents can engage in rather than it being seen as an adult leisure activity. Children and adolescents may be conditioned towards holding unrealistic notions and positive attitudes towards gambling.

Another international expert who has warned about the dangers of online gambling for young people is Sally Gainsbury (2012) of Southern Cross University, Australia, who carried out a review of what was then known about internet gambling. She pointed out that online gambling was more heavily concentrated amongst younger adul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 The new backlash against the growth of commercial gambling
• 2 The Gambling Establishment: The industry and its allies inside and outside government
• 3 The establishment discourse: Five ways we were told how to think about gambling
• 4 How gambling is forcibly advertised and sold in the modern era
• 5 Is modern gambling fraudulent? How players are deceived about the chances of winning
• 6 Understanding gambling addiction: Bringing personal experience and theory together
• 7 Gambling’s harm to individuals, families, communities, and society
• 8 How the Gambling Establishment has used evidence to support its position
• 9 Resisting the power of the Gambling Establishment: A manifesto for change
• References
• Index