An irresponsible gamble

Out-of-date law and human nature mean sports betting is more than harmless fun – it ruins lives, argues Sam Tomlin.

Sam Tomlin

Sam Tomlin is a Salvation Army officer, leading a local church in Liverpool where he lives with his wife and children.

Lars Schmidt, via Wikimedia Commons.

On 21st April 2021 husband and father of two young children Luke Ashton took his own life. Suicide is the biggest cause of death for men under 50 in the UK, but this suicide had a particular source. As recounted by his widow and now anti-gambling campaigner Annie, Luke developed a gambling disorder linked to his support of Leicester City and football gambling more generally. Getting furloughed in the pandemic exacerbated the problem and he succumbed to aggressive advertising on his smart phone, losing more and more money to the point of despair and no return.

I am not surprised to hear of stories like Luke’s. That’s because I am a Salvation Army officer. Some may view the pledge to give up all forms of gambling when you join its ranks as archaic and over-the-top, but this insistence by the Salvation Army, which was founded in the 1800’s, was a response to the devastation to lives addiction can cause. Far from being a thing of the past, gambling continues to wreak havoc, especially in poor communities like the one I live and serve in today. I have had personal items stolen and pawned to fund gambling addictions and have heard of people losing thousands of pounds in a few hours.

Recently our church was part of a local campaign to stop an iconic building from being turned into a cashino, something which we and others in our community knew could have a devastating impact. Thankfully the company withdrew the application, probably because of local opposition, but areas of high socio-economic deprivation like ours are always under such threat.

If you force young people to endorse addictive products, don’t be surprised if they use them.

I have friends who gamble on sport and tell me it is just harmless fun. It makes the experience more exciting when you have money on it, they say, something sports betting companies focus on in their advertising. While not every gambler is a problem gambler (Public Health England estimates there are 2.2 million who either are problem gamblers or are at risk of addiction), I am not convinced that it is harmless fun for two main reasons.

Firstly, the risk of ‘harmless’ gambling turning into problem gambling is not adequately managed by UK legislation. The 2005 Gambling Act refers more to gambling by post than online gambling and was passed at a time before smart phones. This legislation, intended to boost the economy through liberalising gambling laws, has allowed sports gambling to spiral out of control; 40% of Premier League clubs are sponsored by a betting company with many more in lower divisions. Concerns have been raised about transparency on behalf of these betting companies and it seems clear that these companies exploit the Premier League’s global profile to reach potential customers in countries like China where gambling advertising is banned. Aston Villa recently responded to a supporter backlash against a new sponsorship deal but made it clear that money talks: for clubs outside the top six (who can attract significantly greater deals), betting firms offer ‘twice as much financially as non-gambling companies.’

My team, Bristol City, had a gambling sponsor for many years until this season – although ironically children’s shirts had the sponsor changed in a tacit acknowledgement of potential harm. Hypocrisy in football betting runs much deeper though. Ivan Toney the Brentford striker currently faces a lengthy ban for a breach of the FA’s betting rules, but as The Big Step campaign (led by people harmed by gambling) pointed out – with various pictures of Toney receiving awards and shirts with gambling sponsors on them - ‘If you force young people to endorse addictive products, don’t be surprised if they use them.’

It is almost impossible to watch a match on TV without being bombarded with free bet offers and the latest deals with former players enticing fans to gamble their money with a few simple clicks on their phones. One recent study questions whether it is possible to gamble responsibly in an age of smart phones, and outlines significant potential harm even for ‘low and moderate risk gamblers — including relationship problems, being distracted, lost opportunities across work and personal life, secretive behaviours, and a compulsion to open and continually re-engage with the app.’

A review of the Gambling Act is currently being carried out, but frustration is growing as publication is delayed. While a blanket prohibition on gambling would neither be practical or desirable, campaigners hope that steps will be taken to restrict gambling advertising in much the same way that advertising for smoking has been banned. The gambling industry cite the contribution gambling brings to the economy, but a report by the Social Market Foundation suggested that tighter regulation could actually boost the economy and in 2016 it was estimated that gambling addiction cost the economy £1.2bn a year. For a society built on an understanding of ‘freedom,’ however, as defined by challenging anything that might hinder our individual wills, gambling may constitute the example par excellence of the confluence of social and economic liberalism. Any significant change to legislation will be hard-won.

The second reason is that gambling promises more than it can ever actually deliver. This is why it so often ends in harmful addiction – it can never truly satisfy what are ultimately spiritual needs, so it continues to draw you further and further in until you are no longer in control but it controls you.

There are perhaps three main reasons people gamble: the desire to win money, the social aspect and the thrill or excitement. There is no doubt that gambling offers the possibility of fulfilment, to some degree, for all these things: occasionally people win large sums of money, it can make sport more exciting and help make the social experience more fun.

We are indeed made for community and the communal enjoyment of sport.

As Christians see it, however, gambling offers an unreliable and ultimately unsatisfying route to fulfilling these desires. The Bible warns us about the love of money and encourages honest work as opposed to chance for earning what we need to live It also points to the importance of charity and justice for those who do not have enough. We are made for community and the communal enjoyment of sport is a gift from God (as I have written about in the past). It is perfectly possible, however, to enjoy sport without gambling – really supporting and following a team or player comes with enough ups and downs to produce a wide range of emotions; I have cried, bitten my nails, hidden my head in my hands and hugged random strangers often during one single game. It could be argued that even non-problem gambling contributes to fund an industry that demonstrably preys on vulnerable people, failing the command to love our neighbour.

We are also created to experience thrill and excitement beyond the mundane aspects of everyday life, but the greatest drama according to the Christian faith is found in being caught up in God’s redemption of the world, ‘reconciling all things to himself’ as we read in the New Testament. As many Christians will testify – even the most exciting Hollywood film is a pale imitation of the excitement and drama of giving up your life to follow the way of Jesus, and this is certainly true of the fleeting and temporary thrills experienced through gambling.

Unlike some religions which want to supress desire, the Christian faith affirms desire as a good thing. The question is, what our desire is aimed at. Augustine once said that our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. Created things or activities like sex, possessions, money or experiences are good when enjoyed in the right context, but when – like with gambling - they promise more than they can deliver, more often than not it ends in dissatisfaction and potentially even disaster as Luke Ashton’s story tragically demonstrates.

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28 November 2024

4 min read

Here's why we need to keep democracy holy

It's much more than a utilitarian deal that benefits the most.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A sign reading 'polling station' stands by the entrance to a church.

Red Dot on Unsplash.

One of the more ludicrous constitutional contributions of late has been the parliamentary petition, with well past two million signatures when I last looked, demanding another general election be called, because the Labour government, elected in July, has “gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead-up to the last election.”

Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has surprised precisely no one by saying that he won’t be calling one. And so we’ll move on. But, in passing, what is truly breathtaking is how little our democracy is understood and, apparently, how unseriously democracy in the west is now taken. If that sounds unduly censorious, I have a two-word response: Two million!

Little time need be spent on demolishing the premise of this spurious petition, other than to wonder how many of those signatories would have appeared on one calling for, say, a fresh mandate after the coalition government of David Cameron and Nick Clegg (where is he now? Ah yes) performed a massive reverse-ferret on a manifesto pledge not to raise university tuition fees.

Or how many of these same fearless electors believe the result of the Brexit referendum should be voided because of the lies of the Leave campaign, most notable the one painted on the side of Boris Johnson’s battle bus. But no – two million residual, self-righteous righties can only be mobilised against a Labour government.

This event none the less raises valid questions about what our democracy is (and is not) and why we should want to protect or even cherish it. These questions become the more critical because there’s a tangible feeling of slippage in western democracy, as if we’re growing a bit tired and even contemptuous of it.

There’s the ominous re-growth of nationalism across Europe. And not a few bien pensants – me included, to my shame – might admit to a feeling after Donald Trump’s re-election as US president that democracy is too important to be left to the people.

Slightly more seriously, we need to ask ourselves what the qualities of democracy are that we should seek to defend. The first of these is, quite obviously, the rule of law. Should a political actor seek to overthrow a democratically established electoral process, then that is a crime within the rule of law. Witness the horrors on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on January 6 2021.

That’s the Feast of the Epiphany as it happens, but nothing to do with the coming of wise men. With Trump at the centre of it. Draw your own democratic conclusions – and weep for the rule of law.

Natural justice is to ensure that vexatious petitions don’t overthrow legally elected governments, either by lobby or violence.

Again, why does this matter and what is it about democracy that we hold sacred, even holy? It can’t simply be that we hold dear a kind of hard utilitarian ideal that what we elect to do is for the benefit of most of the people, for most of the time, as decided by popular mandate among the demos.

If we believe in democracy, as I believe most of us do, we’re presented with a choice: We can look to secularism as a solution, universal Enlightenment principles built on citizenship and equality before the law. Or we can look to a multiculturist model, keeping the peace between essentially separate communities and the state.

Or we can shape something on Augustinian Christianity, that recognises the limits of political democracy, which would eschew undemocratic theocracy, but which would hold that no political order other than the Body of Christ (the Church) can claim divine authority.

We’re in classic Rowan Williams theological territory here: “[T]he Body of Christ is not a political order on the same level as others, competing for control, but a community that signifies, that points to a possible healed human world.”

Unsurprisingly, I buy that. Williams goes further to state this spiritual effect on the political environments in which we find ourselves is likely to be “sceptical and demystifying.” Which seems to be a reasonable manifesto in a democracy.

The principle of election can be a worrying one in theological terms. We don’t “elect” God, though some secularists would claim that the Godhead is our invention. Rather, it has sometimes been perceived to be the other way around historically.

Reformational Calvinism would hold, among many other things, the rather terrifying view that we’re elected by God. “The Elect” are those who will be saved, while the rest of us (I presume) can rot in hell. Little democracy there.

Less deterministically, a more modernist worldview would argue that the Christian faith, on which foundation western civilisation is built, offers a viable moral definition of the lawful state, with which politicians of all (democratic) persuasions can tackle issues of global justice.

One such issue of natural justice is to ensure that vexatious petitions don’t overthrow legally elected governments, either by lobby or violence. That’s an important aspect of Christian witness and will require true grit in in its application during the years ahead. That’s, if you will, our grit in the democratic oyster.