I was sitting in a cafe just off the Hammersmith Broadway a couple of days ago, enjoying a pot of tea and perusing the Evening Standard, the highlight of which was an interview in the sports pages with a bloke called Nic Coward, who it turns out has been acting chief executive on two occasions for the Football Association and who is now chief exec of the British Horse Racing Authority. Under the title, ‘Corruption Is A Threat That Sport Must Take Seriously’, the interviewer, the Standard’s Mihir Bose, drew out some well made if not predictable points about match fixing, doping and illegal and outright criminal betting right across the sporting spectrum. No sport seems to be immune and no country seems to be above the fray.

The main thrust of the interview focuses on horse racing and how things had improved but how on-lone betting was posing new problems for the gambling authorities. Here is a taste of the thoughts being offered by Coward: ‘Ten years ago, Dick Caborn, the then sports minister, and I agreed that the two greatest threats to the integrity of sport were doping and betting related corruption.’ Coward continues, ‘Sport got to grips with cheating to win through doping- but has yet to understand how to deal with cheating to lose through betting.’ Coward adds, ‘Where things have got out of kilter is that there has been a massive growth in online betting on sports not designed in any shape or form to be betting products.’ And then Coward adds for good measure, ‘And there are betting operators out there who admit that they are offering bets on some sports which don’t have integrity.’

For the next few days all these new terms being banded about by Coward kept swirling around my brain. What on earth were legitimate ‘betting products’ as opposed to illegitimate ones, and what was the dividing line between sports with ‘integrity’ and those sports without? He seemed to be arguing that there was a natural correlation between sport and betting and that the only task facing the ‘authorities’ was to regulate this symbiotic relationship. The whole interview rested on the premise that sports and gambling were natural partners and certainly, Mihir Bose did nothing to challenge that premise.’

In chewing all this over, my mind travelled back to the early days of the Tony Blair Labour administration and his pledge to liberate gambling in Britain by allowing casinos to spring up in every high street across the country. I remember at the time being flabbergasted at this supposedly socially progressive Labour Government trumpeting what I and many others considered a wholly reactionary policy, and being equally relieved when his successor quietly dropped the whole idea. Now Gordon Brown might forever be condemned for failing to stand up to the totally illegal war against Iraq, and for his complete failure to stand up to the casino capitalists in the City of London, but he might be due some tiny credit for sparing Britain the curse of the super casino.’

I’m sure I will be reminded by many a reader that three of the oldest pursuits of mankind are war, prostitution and gambling. That may be so but are we to deduce from this that humans are forever doomed to partake in these pursuits? We are above all an evolving specie and surely it is our growing ability to reflect upon our human condition that separates us from all other species. We have certainly come a long way in our five million year evolution from ape to man but with exponential speed, most of our social consciousness has come within the last five hundred years. We now understand the broad contours of our own evolution thanks to Darwin and his successors, though tens of millions still clung to the fairy tale of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. We now understand that we are not the centre of the universe but rather just a speck in one of some two billion galaxies in perhaps an ever expanding and contracting universe. Above all, large numbers of us now understand that our actions are not fixed and immutable but are instead the product of our individual and collective will, invariably contradictory in direction, but always man made as opposed to god sent.

Armed with these scientific premises, we humans can increasingly choose our collective path. We are no longer at the mercy of the blind forces of our earlier evolution. We can opt consciously not to go to war. We can opt consciously not to force women into prostitution. We can opt consciously not to equate sporting endeavour with gambling, match fixing and doping if we so choose. We have now evolved to the point where we can rise above our base animal instincts and choose rational paths for our collective benefit.

But am I wrong to equate some harmless fun with the darker side of our collective human past? What is so wrong with a little flutter down at the bookies just so long as the sport in question is honest and above board? What’s so wrong with some light-hearted gambling with some friends over an evening of cards or a fun filled day at the races? What about a little flutter on the forthcoming World Cup? What harm can there be in that? I noticed that one betting company was offering 2000-1 for North Korea to win in South Africa and I must admit I was a little tempted. Just a little bit of fun. No harm to anyone other than to my meagre bank balance.

But of course, betting rarely remains just a little bit of fun. In Australia the ‘pokies’, or slot machines as they are known in the UK, were given free range and in no time at all nearly every pub and club were dominated by them and addiction was widespread. Similarly, on-line betting is proving to be highly addictive with no social component at all. And whether Nic Coward and Mihir Bose care to admit it, gambling, like prostitution, will inevitably lead to criminality because behind the little bit of harmless fun is another manifestation of our fixation with monetary gain and the supposed joys it can bring.

It is not an accident that running parallel with the explosion of individual gambling is a similar but potentially deadly rise of casino capitalism where entire countries are falling prey to the gambling instincts of global corporate banking. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and all the international investment banks, including our own high street banks like Lloyds and Barclays, have brought the world economy to its knees with their thirst for a quick profit from the stock and currency markets. Seen this way, the human thirst for gambling is anything but harmless.

If we strip gambling down to the bone, it is nothing but yet another manifestation of our class based society with its handful of winners who are desperate to remain at the top, and the teaming mass of toilers who forever dream of joining the ruling elite. Gambling represents a false hope that one can easily escape one’s class prison and in order to be effective a tiny handful must be allowed to win. That is the logic of the lottery: in reality a tax on the poor, who have a greater statistical chance of being knocked down on the way to but their ticket than in actually buying the winning ticket.

The whole gambling industry, and that is what it is, is like a parasite, feeding off the host, sucking out the blood until the host grows sick and weak. It is, from my standpoint, a rather ignoble and banal pursuit that we can choose to legislate against, but one that will only truly wither when class society with its intrinsic inequities based on material scarcity, both natural and manufactured, are substantially overcome. ‘I’m not betting that that may be any time soon, but in terms of our long evolution its seedy demise may be just around the corner. In the meantime, sport should seek to rid itself of the parasite.

End JPK copyright 4/6/10
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Monday, 28 May 2018 10:26 )