The respectable evil in Britain today

The "BetFred World Snooker championship". Has a nice ring to it don't you think? I remember back in 1986 a friend complained that the UK Open (snooker again) had just been renamed "The Dulux Open", saying that was surely the ugliest name ever given to a prestigious sporting event. Until now. Now we have a betting firm smeared all over our TV screens from morning till night and this will only get worse in the next week or so.


I watch a fair amount of TV, as my friends and followers will know only too well, but in recent months I have been appalled by the growing number of adverts for betting. The bookmakers are seeking to make losing money a totally respectable bit of fun that anyone would feel happy to take part in- what's wrong with that? the ads seem to ask. I'll tell you: plenty.


When I was a kid our family would gamble sometimes. We'd play blackjack and poker (for penny stakes) and on high days and holidays the roulette wheel would be dusted off and placed on the dining table. But my father made it very clear to us how the odds were always stacked in favour of the bank: that if you and the bank have the same score in blackjack, you lose, that roulette pays out less than the actual odds-against score you have wagered, plus there is the zero, which when it comes up everyone, except the bank, loses. That slot machines (fruit machines we used to call them) are programmed in advance to allow the punter to win- but only occasionally.


When Pavlov carried out his pioneering work into manipulating animal behaviour in the 1930s, he discovered that the best way to guarantee an animal's co-operation was to reward it occasionally for a given behaviour. He called this "positive intermittent reinforcement" and turns out it works superbly well in human beings too. If you lose most of the time but win occasionally, this is the very best way imaginable to ensure the behaviour continues. Gambling relies on this phenomenon, and has made the bookmakers billions over the years. They're becoming even richer now, with online gambling showing an unprecedented boom.


We know how the main political parties feel about it, why, Labour was happy to finance the building of vast "super-casinos" around the country until they realised the opposition they'd incur. The Tories aren't interested; I'm sure some of the big bookies support them financially. So the issue of gambling and whether a society should encourage it or discourage it (through taxation or other methods) is simply not on the table.


I say, it bloody well should be.