Mr Viral
Jon Bruford writes on how the dominance of middle class voices is affecting the fight for responsible gambling.
First off, I’d like to acknowledge a couple of things: This column is likely to anger people on both sides of the responsible gambling argument, and I’m very much working class.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about critics of gambling, but also of the people defending the business and I think there is a fundamental problem affecting both sides of the argument. Basically, too many people in the fight are middle class.
Obviously that doesn’t make them bad people, it just skews their world view away from where it really ought to be. It skews their base understanding of gambling as an issue and it unfortunately often makes their arguments sound more than a little condescending.
The ban that wasn’t
A while back I wrote a piece about The Guardian’s ban on gambling advertising, because the thing that annoyed me so much was that the UK’s National Lottery was still allowed to advertise. That made – and makes – zero sense to me and to any rational human. So why was it allowed? As the paper itself announced, it’s because it has “social benefits through raising money for good causes and typically involved ‘non-instantaneous draws’”.
The operator at the time, Camelot, told me proudly that they had an outlet less than one mile from almost every home in Great Britain. But that’s OK, because the lottery funds other nice things that the middle class enjoy. Arts funding, specifically. Several opera groups and venues in the UK are supported financially by the National Lottery, which I am sure warms the hearts of people in Bradford.
My point here is that one of the industry’s key critics is also most representative of the country’s middle class. And as I have said before, I would bet real cash money that none of their journalists have been outside a newsagents in Broadway on the day benefits are paid to see people walking out with armfuls of scratchcards.
Deprivation occurs before the bookies
A frequent criticism of gambling is that bookmakers are clustered in poor, deprived areas. And they are, by and large. It’s hard to disagree with that. It’s also worth noting though that there are more pubs around football grounds than there are next to Waitrose supermarkets. Do you know why? Because they will sell more beer.
And bookies pop up in poorer areas, because they will do more business. My issues here though is not with those bookmakers – it’s with those middle class critics. What are they missing? Well, first and foremost, the deprivation comes before the bookies. Long, long before, in fact. The bookmaker is not causing the deprivation in these areas – far from it. In fact bookies in places with few services or jobs tend to become social hubs as much as anything else. They’re also taking bets from people with very little to lose, but there’s the real issue. It’s not that bookies proliferate where there are poor people or deprivation, it’s that they proliferate where people are desperate and just want a little bit of hope.
The key is the deprivation. Criticise the bookies, criticise the industry all you want, but if you don’t do anything about poverty, unemployment and everything that goes with it, you’re not even urinating in the wind. You haven’t even unzipped, you’re just soaking your own leg. There’s a reason you won’t find nearly as many in London’s Kensington, or Westminster.
Social mobility is dead and gone. You can ignore the research on this even, because I’m pretty sure the people at the Institute for Fiscal Studies are all university educated and middle class. The IFS says it’s a bit more difficult for people to move up in the world, but it’s not – it’s basically impossible.
The organisation says, “It may be harder now than at any point in over half a century to move up if you are born in a position of disadvantage.” If your parents don’t own and leave you property (or gift you the deposit), you’re not buying a house. If you get in to university, you’ll leave with debt of well over £30k before you’ve even got a sniff of a job.
Poor people are going to stay poor and everything is geared towards them doing so. Should they have any hope? Any escape, temporary as it’s bound to be? People suggesting a gambling ban have (on the whole) never been desperate, never been hungry and almost certainly never been homeless. Winning some money is a way out. It’s a bill paid, it’s heating switched on, it’s Christmas presents, it’s better food. Hey, I’m not saying it’s realistic – I’m saying where there’s no hope, what the hell do you expect?
Lack of empathy in the responsible gambling argument
I had a conversation with a guy several years ago who was complaining about a potential housing development on privately owned land next to the village he lived in. Nice guy in most ways, but he had that Not-In-My-Back-Yard mentality that blows my mind. He said, the houses will spoil the view from the village. Well, no, I said. They’ll change it a bit. He said, there’s no infrastructure there, though. I said, we’re not talking about a huge development though, are we? Then I asked him the big one: “[REDACTED], have you ever been homeless?”
“No, why?”
“Because there is a massive housing shortage in this area and hardly any social housing and people need somewhere to live. This development has to guarantee a large percentage of affordable housing.”
“Oh.”
I don’t think we’ve spoken since. He just couldn’t see how it affected the world as a whole, not just him. Sometimes people take a stance on things because it affects them in a real way; often though, that stance is based on a moral perception borne from privilege and that’s a very dangerous place to formulate a view from. “Gambling is bad, look at how it affects the poor people!” Yep, it’s really disproportionate, isn’t it? Wonder what we could do about that…. Hey, how about making them not-poor?? Decisions are being made by people that have never worked three jobs simultaneously, have never eaten out of a bin, have never not had a roof over their heads. How can that be right?
Lived experience key for responsible gambling debates
On the industry side, researchers are generally middle class and responsible gambling proponents are middle class. Does this skew their research? I’d argue that it must and, not only that, it skews their understanding of their own research. Hell, it skews deciding what to research in the first place. Data is useless without understanding context and to understand context you surely need some experience. Research needs lived experience oversight, in my opinion, to give it grounding, relevance and real understanding. Reading about domestic violence doesn’t mean you understand abuse, or the measures people reach for to cope with it. They’re just abstractions, numbers. Reducing those experiencing harm to numbers doesn’t help anyone. But understanding how they got there, that could change everything.
So we get to the point: People with lived experience are more important in this conversation than ever before. Almost every one of them I have spoken to has had a calm and measured opinion on the issues within the gambling industry – not a prohibitionist or alarmist stance at all. They understand far more than you or I ever could and that experience should be used in the right way across every possible strand of responsible gambling and research.
Will it be? I’m unsure, because most of them are working class. As an industry we need to find a way to learn more and learn better from these people, because they’re the only ones that have lived the problem and understand not just the path into despair, but the path out, too.
Jon Bruford has been working in the gambling industry for over 17 years, formerly as managing editor of Casino International and presently as publishing director at The Gaming Boardroom, with Kate Chambers and Greg Saint.
