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.
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.