So I understand that today, the government will announce who has won the bid to have the UK’s first supercasino.
The eight councils named on the shortlist by the Casino Advisory Panel are the favourites Blackpool, as well as Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and the London boroughs of Brent and Greenwich. The winner will be allowed to build one uber casino with over a thousand slot machines, with unlimited jackpots!
The rationale behind this, and the new gambling bill, is the belief that new casino projects will support urban regeneration by creating jobs and encouraging tourism. But this puzzles me, because none of the income from such a casino will be brought in from overseas, in fact it will come from those people that can least afford it - in an effort to wipe out their haemorraging debts (the average household debt in the UK is ~ £8,765 excluding mortgages and £52,811 including mortgages, the average owed by every UK adult is ~ £27,180 including mortgages). The growth of gambling in the UK (and everywhere else?) is the result of playing on the “get rich quick” concept that is so alluring, particularly to those that can’t see a way out from under their growing loans, credit cards and car financing. As Yoda so wisely said “If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice”.
So whilst yes perhaps this supercasino will regenerate an urban area, it will come at the price of cash-strapped people heading to it from all areas of the country in the hope that they will get one lucky break and win a jackpot, when the reality is that most of the money taken to a casino stays there. Just for the record - I’ve done the whole Vegas thing and it was good fun, in fact I actually won enough money to have a very entertaining evening that, if you ask me, I would be pleased to tell you about. However I realise that the only way I’ll ever beat the casino is not to go back in. I was just lucky, unlike the thousands of people in Vegas every day pumping their life savings in to those machines and on those card tables.
So it’s a long shot, but I hope that the Government’s announcement today is that they have changed their minds, and that we really don’t need an more casinos at all thank you very much. However I get the feeling that I hope in vain.
