YouSaid · the spoken record

Rob Davies

lines on the record: 64
first: 2022-02-28
most recent: 2022-02-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Right, all of that kind of stuff, but a lot of people are getting caught up in that net simply because they have an eye for a good price.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and look, sometimes there are good reasons for that. There are people who are obviously cheating or stable hands who know that the horse has gone lame or whatever it is and various other types.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whereas, if you're losing, I don't know if they're still doing this, but certainly historically has been the case. If you're losing, the amount you can bet, get styled up and up and up. So essentially the bookmaker is saying, come in, have a bet, place a wager. It's you against me. And, you know, fate will decide. But actually, if you're good at spotting when the book's got the odds wrong, if you're smarter than them, golf or tennis or some niche area where they haven't got that, you know, their traders, which the people that compile the odds aren't that good, well, they'll just stop you winning. So the whole game is rigged, right? The house always wins. That's a given. But the house always wins usually because there's a built-in edge. But the house always wins now, partly because if you win, well, they don't want your business anymore.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think you're talking about stake factoring. This is something which people in the industry have been tweeting at me and saying, oh, you idiot, everyone knows this, but actually most people don't know it, which is that if you start winning with a bookmaker, quite quickly, the amount you're allowed to bet will get dialed down and down and down.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's what we're really talking about with things like fixed odds, betting terminals, with some of the aspects of casino games and slots and even of sports betting where rates of addiction tend to be lower. These are things that are designed to be addictive to an extent. And I'm not necessarily talking about an evil person sitting there thinking, oh, I know if I do this, someone will become addicted. But that is the incentive mechanism. That's the structure is all geared towards maximizing profit. And it's almost like it's almost Darwinian. Anything that maximizes profit is through a process of trial and error is going to be something that the industry gravitates towards. And often those are the things that are the most risky.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that's a big philosophical question, isn't it? I mean, I think most of the people I've talked to who are in recovery would say yes, absolutely. And they do, right? But both sides have to take responsibility. The industry has to take responsibility. I mean, one of the terms that I try not to use anymore, I have used it in the book and sort of apologize to anyone who may have offended, but it's problem gamblers. And that's a phrase that the industry likes to use. Problem gamblers and responsible gamblers.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not finite. As I said before, if you drink too much or you take a lot of drugs, eventually you're going to pass out or become ill or be hospitalized. But you only need to stop gambling when you haven't got any more money. And if you can borrow or steal, you can always get more money. And people do that. So I think that's the other key point about gambling addiction that people don't necessarily realize”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is when there's nowhere left for that person to turn, when the police turn up, or when the bailiffs turn up, or when that person confesses all. I mean, that is just such a common story. And, you know, with drug and alcohol addiction, you do get people who are high functioning drug addicts or alcoholics, but ultimately, if someone is extremely intoxicated, you can see that. And over time, you can see the ravages that it has on the body. And I'm not saying gambling is worse than those things. I'm definitely not saying that. But it is different. And that is perhaps the unique aspect, or one of the unique aspects that makes it so troubling. The other, I think, unique aspect is...”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's sometimes called the hidden addiction. And I know people who are not comfortable with that description for various reasons. But the reason why it's described that way is that I could be on the sofa next to my wife downstairs while we're watching Killing Eve or whatever on my phone. And she thinks I'm, I don't know, browsing Twitter as I do compulsively or Whatsapping a friend and I'm actually gambling away our life savings or my child's inheritance or his university fund or whatever it might be. And the first thing that your spouse knows is when they find out the mortgage hasn't been paid that week or that month. And I've talked to loads of people where this has happened. The first thing that the spouse knows or the parent knows, sometimes the employer, if they've been stolen from.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The national average standards. And you've got to be careful about attributing cause to suicide. But it wasn't about financial ruin. Jack's parents could afford to bail him out. So it isn't just about the concern about gambling addiction isn't just about people from worse off backgrounds losing everything they have. It's about loss of control. It's about mental health and all of that and all those things that can affect people across race and across class boundaries and across gender.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you can say that it's skewed towards lower income people. There's often, it depends on the activity there, but certainly with things like fixed odds betting terminals in bookmakers, that was very much big in low-income areas. And, you know, the bookies know that. They know what they're doing, right? And I think that's profiting from a level of desperation from people thinking, well, I've got my 20 quid universal credit, whatever it is, you know, if I'm lucky, I can turn this into a thousand pounds. And people are comfortable don't take those kinds of risks because they don't need to. Now, I do think it's also important to say that gambling addiction is no respect of class and of income. The kind of story that the book begins with in which some people will be familiar with because it's been documented by lots of other news organizations is that of Jack Richie, who very sadly took his own life at the age of, I think, 24. His parents were relatively well off by...”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You do see some standout areas. Like, for instance, I mean, this is going off the health survey from 2016, so it's quite old data. And again, I don't have it in front of me. But, I mean, you do see some sort of higher levels of addiction in certain racial groups, for instance. I don't want to say what they are here because I'm not certain about them. I don't have them off the top of my head. Certainly younger, excuse male.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there's an addiction clinic in Scotland that I wrote about recently where they're sort of specialising in cryptocurrency addiction and they're seeing parallels with gambling there as well. I mean, they are different. I think it's important to recognize that there are things that are unique about each, but there's a Venn diagram and there's an area in the center where you're seeing some of the same activities and behaviors. And I guess you've probably seen that too in your extremely good reporting.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there are two different things to look at there. One is are we going to see gambling companies accepting cryptocurrency as a means of betting? That's not really happening in the UK at the moment, but it is happening elsewhere. But yeah, the other is the trading of cryptocurrency, the buying and selling of cryptocurrency, like gambling. And there are definite parallels there in terms of the ease of access via your smartphone, the kind of the social element of it, cryptocurrency. As you know, relies very heavily on people talking to each other on social media and saying, get into this one while it's still on the ground floor. And that's a lot like gambling, right? You get tipsters saying, oh, there's really good odds on this particular match. And you get people sort of sending it to one another. So yeah, there's a lot of parallels. And actually, what you're seeing is the National Gambling helpline is getting more and more calls from people who are calling about their cryptocurrency problem, their trading problem, not about gambling at all.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experience, and that's one of the most dangerous things that can happen to a gambler, a big win early on, because that creates that dopamine rush, that hit, that thing you're then always trying to replicate. And of course, it's probably not coming again, or not for a long time anyway. And in that time, how much are you feeding into the machine without thinking it? Because you're seeking that same rush.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because that's how you balance your books, and that's how you make plans ahead. So, yeah, cross selling is a huge thing. Cross-selling is where you sign up for a football betting account because you love football, let's say, and you just, you know, you want to put two quid on an accumulator at the weekend, all of a sudden you're going to start being offered casino products and slots and so on. And, you know, they want to make sure that you're playing every single type of product. But yeah, no, loads of people are playing casino in slots. It's huge. I don't see the appeal at all. I mean, I've done it a little bit, again, for research purposes. One of the things I noticed, and I'm not saying that companies do this deliberately because I've got no evidence to prove that. But I got a big win quite early on. So I put in whatever it was, 10 quid on the slots. And I think I got 50 quid back within the first few minutes of playing. And I never got that again. So I kept playing until I essentially lost all the money because, you know, I wanted to replicate.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the very high growth, the two really big growth areas in gambling, football betting and slots, and to some extent casino games. I don't have the figures in front of me. Off the top of my head, I think casino, you're talking about £3 billion a year that may be including slots as well. I'm not 100% sure. Whereas football is more like £2 billion a year. So actually the casino is bigger. I mean, the thing about all, you know, casino and so on is you don't necessarily lose more as an individual punter because you can lose quite a lot on sports betting, but it is very reliable income. Those are all fixed odds games. The companies know exactly how much of your money they're going to get more or less if averaged out over the course of a year and over millions of punters. So of course they're going to push that stuff because if you're a chief finance officer, a FTSE 100 company, the one thing you love above all else is reliable revenue.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it depends who you are, right? I mean, there are pro gamblers out there who spend their entire lives hunting down occasions where the bookie's got the odds slightly wrong and comparing odds. I'm not particularly interested in gambling. I've done it a little bit, partly just as research. I probably wouldn't spend that much time looking between different companies. The majority of them are offering the same odds now anyway because they're all comparing it against things like odds checker or just looking at the bet fair market and roughly coming out with the same kind of odds anyway. Yeah, I remember those booths. We had them at Whiteheart Lane. We don't seem to have them at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, but I'm reliably informed they're all over the London stadium at West Ham because Betway are a huge sponsor of West Ham. But I mean, I'll tell you one thing that I found quite funny actually is we have very good Wi-Fi at the Tottenham Hotswood Stadium. And William Hill are the main gambling sponsor at Spurs. And if you try and go on the Ladbrooks or the Bet 365 website from the Wi-Fi and your seat at Tottenham Hopspur,”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there was nothing else to do. You stuck at home. So I think that's what the early signs are showing us. I think it'll be a little while before we get the data to see how that plays out. Part of the reason we don't have that data, I should stress, is because William Hill had been submitting shonky data for months on end and the Gambling Commissioners had to go back and redo all of its sums. I think there might be a fine coming down the road for William Hill on that. So watch this space.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there was necessarily more online gambling during lockdown because there was no, or for long periods there was no high street gambling. So a lot of that money shifted from going into the bookmakers to going online. Perhaps this is a stereotype, but I'm guessing perhaps some of the older hunters at the bookmakers who perhaps weren't as familiar with the internet started going online. But what we've seen is that as bookmakers have opened up again, the customers flowed back into the bookmakers, but some of those online players, it's been quite sticky. People have stayed betting online, particularly on things like slot machines and so on. And so people have developed a taste for it. We haven't yet got the figures to give us kind of comprehensive breakdown of the kind of final impact of COVID. But I think what we've seen so far is that overall gambling hasn't necessarily gone up, but some of the people at the margins, the people of very intense gamblers, people who are perhaps most at risk, most vulnerable, their gambling is intensified because”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have. I mean, that was one of my favorite chapters to write because I learned so much while doing it, and that's one that I'd really urge people to look at. I mean, I did, there's an extract in The Guardian a week or two ago about this that I'd urge people to go and read if they've decided that they don't want to spend whatever it is, 14 quid on the book, then go and read that extract in The Guardian, because some of that is in there. And it's really fascinating stuff.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just yeah, briefly, you know, you've got the advertising on one hand, but what you've also got are these kind of psychological tools that the gambling industry has used since time immemorial to take advantage of the kind of psychological traits that they know we have. And these are used very, very subtly. And a lot of this stuff is inbuilt into the way gambling games might work, right? So for instance, we probably don't have time to get into this now, but one of the ones I talk about is the near miss. You put your money on 25 on the roulette table and it lands on 26. You feel like you nearly won, even though it's no different to if it had landed on one. And the industry has found really, really good ways of introducing some of these kind of casino era psychological tricks into things like sports betting so that, you know, these little triggers in the brain are kind of catalyzed and they can prey upon these psychological weaknesses that we all.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And football fan TV channels on YouTube and so on, suddenly it's part of the conversation you're hearing rather than part of an advert break that comes in between the content you want to hear. I mean, on TalkSport radio, for instance, the commentators are commentating on the game and occasionally reading out odds in between it. As part of the play, as part of their commentary. So these are all kind of very different and subtle ways that the industry is getting into our minds. And, you know, it's very clever stuff. And it's, I think, much more powerful in lots of ways, much more insidious than run of the mill advertising.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The captain of an oil tanker turns the wheel or the tiller, it actually probably just presses a button now. The tanker continues for another mile before it changes direction, right? And culture is similar to that. You change the law now. That doesn't mean that there won't be four, five, six more years in which people are sort of growing up with these ideas very much fixed in their minds of gambling being an ordinary part of life, of being part and parcel of their social interaction with their peers. So, yeah, and the person who asked the question, sorry, I can't remember her name, it might have been Sarah, these M ⁇ tis messages you get on social media are really part and parcel of that because, you know, this is not, we're very aware of when we're being advertised to, right? If there's an advert on TV, but this sort of stuff is much more subtle. And it gets into things like fan culture, you know, podcasts and...”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the question is, the gambling industry is pretty good at stopping under 18s from betting, right? So, you know, I suppose damning with faint praise, I guess. But that doesn't mean that that kind of advertising isn't having an effect on young minds. When you're seeing that on Twitter, it's normalizing it, right? And one of the points that I make in the book, I'll probably make it too many times, but I just think it's really important is that we talk about the effect that the saturation of sport with gambling has on people and it doesn't have that much of an effect on my generation, I don't think, because we remember a time before that. And, you know, your attitude to life and the way you receive these messages are perhaps slightly more fixed by the time you hit 21, 25, whatever it might be. But somebody turning 18 this year is really part of the first generation.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essentially writing MPs' questions for them. You know, it's very hard to prove this stuff, of course. But what you can show is, I mean, there's one example, I did this in a story for The Guardian recently. It's not in the book. There's an MP called Scott Benton, who's, I think it's Blackpool South, is his constituency. You know, he's still up in Parliament and said that the gambling commission had been going way too far and it was too strict on the industry, which more or less nobody thinks, right? The National Audit Office, Public Accounts Committee have done reports saying the complete opposite, very robust reports. So he stood up and said all that stuff. And then three hours later, he's putting on his coat and going out to Wembley with the gambling industry. I forget which operator it was now. So, you know, is this kind of lobbying having an effect? Yes, having an effect. You can see it. You can see these interventions in Parliament. You can count it for yourself. The question is, what's going on behind?”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you've got to be a bit careful here, right? Because there isn't gambling policy being made all the time. So you don't have this obvious chain of cause and effect. What you have is sort of years and years of this kind of drip, drip, drip lobbying effort by the industry in the hope that further down the line it will stand them in good stead. They're trying to get MPs on side for the point at which there's a vote, which is a point which we're coming to. I sort of I didn't end up writing a story about this because there was too much else going on, but somebody very helpfully provided me with a sheet of paper that showed parliamentary interventions by a number of MPs who'd accepted either hospitality or second jobs from the gambling industry and quotes by the betting and gaming council or people who work for them. And there are sections of text that are more or less word for word. So what you're getting is the gambling industry.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're allowed to get away with only the measures that they themselves come up with. And that's why I think regulation is so important. We're now at a point where this is really important now. We've got to get this right now because we didn't get it right in 2005, partly due to bad luck with the timing of, as I mentioned, smartphones and so on, but partly because it was just done badly and it was done with the wrong incentives in mind. And without putting in place the kind of safety net to pick up people who fell between the cracks and to make sure that we were actually documenting and quantifying how badly people were being hurt.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scot free. You know, I think it's important to say the industry has improved a little bit over the past two, three years, but I think the counterpoint to that, the analogy I always use is if my cat gets up on the kitchen counter, I can be sitting in my chair going, get down, get down. And it won't move. It's only when it sees me coming towards it with menace in my eyes that the cat will jump down just as I'm about to shove it off the table. And that's the way the gambling industry has behaved in the last couple of years, to my mind. They've seen the writing on the wall and they've gone, oh, look, don't worry. We'll regulate ourselves. Here's the whistle-to-whistle ban. Here's a new initiative we're doing on game design or whatever it might be because they'd much rather be in control of regulatory reform than have it imposed upon them. And I think any industry that doesn't act on those things until it's absolutely has no other choice cannot be trusted to mark its own homework. And it cannot be trusted not to backslide.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, I think there's a bit of that. And also the other thing is that I'm not a campaigner. But what the industry would tell you, or what some people, sorry, what the lobby groups for the industry would tell you, people like Michael Duggar at the Bettingham Gaming Council and people like Tom Watson, they use this term prohibitionists to talk about campaigners, to talk about people like me as well. Now, I have run across pretty much every extreme of attitudes towards the gambling industry, and I can't think of a single person I've met who wants all gambling banned. Maybe the odd comment on Twitter that I've seen somewhere, but there are no prohibitionists. No one wants prohibition. What they want is a regulation that is fit for purpose, a regulator that will do its job. What they want is for multi-billion pound companies not to exploit the vulnerable and the poor, not to take every last penny from them and get away with it.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it's really important to be even-handed. I'd say I've probably more even-handed in the book than I have been in my reporting, just partly because of the nature of news journalism, right? Which is you don't write a story when everything's going well. You write a story when something goes wrong. Sure, the industry pays tax. It employs people. I don't think those are get-out clauses for bad behavior. Otherwise, you could argue that about drug dealing, prostitution, anything else. You could say, you know, maybe employment, perhaps not taxes. Yeah, look, I think it's important not to demonize an entire industry. There are so many people I've spoken to in the industry who are really decent moral people who feel that parts of their sector have taken it too far. And I think that's pretty well recognized. And in fact, many of the people who are at the top of gambling companies are not really gambling people. They're CEOs. They're boardroom people. And what they're interested in is maximizing.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was involved in government policy, said to me, Look, when Philip Davis comes towards you in the lobby, you already know what he's going to say about gambling and you can kind of safely ignore it. The question for me is more, what's going on in the other direction? What do MPs who are in the employee of the gambling industry? What are they hearing about the winds of change in the making of policy? And what are they feeding back to those companies? And I've got no evidence that they're doing that, but it just strikes me as a threat to democracy, you know, those kinds of cozy relationships. And it's all happening in plain sight. It's all declared. But that's, I mean, that's almost one of the most concerning things about it. I suppose it's better than it happening without our knowing. But it's interesting that we have this democracy in which that's completely tolerated.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, absolutely. I mean, and MP's second jobs has become a huge issue over the past six months. But, you know, this goes back a long way. You've got MPs like Philip Davis, who's who earned £55,000 in a year, well, in less than a year, actually, because it was for a few months work. We're talking about 400, I think it was £200 an hour he was earning for them. There was Lawrence Robertson as well who was earning, one of them was earning £200 an hour. One of them was earning £400 an hour. You know, 55 grand in under a year for having a second job, again, advising on safer gambling and customer service to entane, which is the owner of Ladbrooks. Now, I personally find it very difficult to believe that Philip Davis MP has anything to tell Entain about customer service or about safer gambling. So you ask yourself at that point, why are they paying him £55,000? Now, I'm not saying he can influence government policy. In fact, one former minister who”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gaming Council, which is the lobby group, or they call it a standards body, but the lobby group for the gambling industry, you know, the industry spends very heavily on hospitality. There's a lot of labor and conservative MPs who enjoyed the largest of the gambling industry during the summer of sport. They were going to Euro 2020. They were going to Ascot. They were going to Lourdes. And then quite often you would see these same MPs in Parliament days later talking about we have to be careful about not regulating the gambling industry too hard. I mean.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's a separate discussion being the one that's actually looking at reining in this industry. So we sort of, yeah, it doesn't break along the lines that people necessarily expect it to. And actually, Labour's been very quiet on that. And if anything, a lot of Laboured politicians are quite in bed with the gambling industry. There's been a bit of a revolving door between Labour and the gambling industry, which I think is what you're getting at. I mean, Tom Watson, the former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, when he was in that position, he was very, very vocal on gambling issues, very critical of the gambling industry. Well, he left politics and he's now an advisor to Paddy Power on safer gambling. Tom Watson can tell Paddy Power about safer gambling, I don't know, personally. But, I mean, that's not where it ends. I mean, Michael Duggar, who's a very close personal friend of Tom Watson, former Labour MP, former spokesman for Gordon Brown, he's now the chief executive of the Betting and”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely not. I mean, I think the thing that I would say is probably the most vocal and effective campaigner on gambling issues in Parliament is a Labour MP, Carolyn Harris, the MP for Swansea East. But first of all, it was Labour that introduced the regulatory landscape that we have today. And that was sort of part of the kind of Blairite ethos that I think it was Mandelson, Peter Mandelson, who said, I'm intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes. You know, there's some logic to that. But the idea was we can create this kind of money-spinning, world-leading gambling industry. And because capitalism always sorts things out in the end, the industry will self-regulate because it won't want to go over the line and be punished for it. But actually, for lots and lots of different reasons, things didn't work out like that. And now we're looking at a party that people think of as being the bastion of free market capitalism. I'm not sure it is now.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that's a big question, right? I mean, I think this government actually does have quite an appetite for regulatory reform when it comes to gambling. It's been quite a strange one. Labour's been very quiet on it, whereas there are people at the top of the Tory party who are pretty keen on reform. There's all kinds of things, you know, outcomes that you might see.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Between various ministers and the treasury, and essentially the Treasury delayed it for six months. And you'll hear differences of opinion on whether there was a delay or when the date was originally meant to be and all of this. But the upshot was that Tracy Crouch wouldn't go along with that. And she resigned and it led to a kind of a cross-party movement, a kind of rebellion. And eventually the government was forced to back down. And, you know, that was quite an extraordinary moment in the history of gambling regulation because it kind of really brought it to the forefront of people's minds. You were seeing it talked about on TV shows. You were seeing soap storylines about gambling addiction all of a sudden. And I think that has kind of led us to where we are now, which is with the rest of the industry being looked at and a government review that is underway at the moment with a white paper expected within the next few months.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People had lost £10,000 in a single session more than 13 times one year. And the number of times that people lost more than £1,000 in a year was astronomical. It was tens of thousands of times that this had happened. And so I don't know if people will remember this, but they became a political hot button issue. And there was a campaign to reduce the stakes on FixO's besting terminals from £100 to £2. The campaign was eventually successful. And at the beginning of this podcast, you said that my reporting on that had led to the resignation of Tracy Crouch. I want to slightly disavow that Tracy Crouch's resignation was not due to anything that I did. Tracy Crouch's resignation was on a point of principle. She was the minister in charge of that review of, and she'd been promised that the stakes on FOBTs were going to be cut to two pounds and that it was going to be done quickly. And there's a bit in the book where it discusses how this happened, but there was a bit of chicane.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, they were used for money laundering, right? If you've got 200 quid in your pocket from selling drugs on the street, I mean, you're going to put it into a fob team. You're going to get back clean money and you've probably washed your cash more cheaply than you could do in lots of other ways. But they also had the potential for people to rack up unbelievable losses in a short space of time if they were unlucky. You know, there was a report that came out, I think it was from the Gambler.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were so rapid fire, and because you could bet quite high stakes on them, people would stand in front of the machines just doing spin after spin after spin. And in theory, the losses aren't necessarily that great because the return to player is about, I think it was about 97% on a FOBT, which is essentially if I put in £100 over time, I'm likely to get 97 pounds back. It's a guaranteed win for the bookmaker and it shouldn't be too great a loss for me.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So fixed odds betting terminals is essentially digital roulette. There are other things you could do on the machines, but that was by far the most popular. And if you went into a bookmaker, well, even if you go into a bookmaker's now, to be honest, but if you went in four or five years ago, you'd see four of these machines in every shop because bookmakers were only allowed for per shop, so they would have four in each one. And then once they had the regulation four, usually they would open a shop three or four meters down the three or four shops down the road so they could fit in another four there. And you could bet £100 every 20 seconds on these things. And people were entranced by them. And I've heard gamblers tell me that, but I've seen it in person. I mean, during my reporting, I would go up and down Newham High Street, for instance, or around Birmingham watching people play the machines. And they just seem to have a particular effect on people.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's, I think, you know, Barbara Windsor, rest in peace, was the face of, I think, Jackpot Joy it was for a long time. So, yeah, the industry's become quite smart at working out where it can kind of fill in the gaps of participation in recent years. And what we've seen, according to a number of recent studies, is increased rates of problem gambling among women. And what's quite interesting among women is that they don't seem to be able to talk about it as much. They don't seem to seek help as much as men. There seems to be a greater stigma, a greater shame around it, perhaps because historically it has been more unusual for women to be gambling addicts. So, you know, you risk people slipping through the cracks there. And one of the things I would have liked to have done in the book, if I had any regrets, is to have more female voices, but perhaps because of that stigma, perhaps because of that shame, it was quite difficult to get more women to come forward and speak to me about it.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, the industry's been very smart with that, right? There's a sort of a pool of people who are likely to be interested in gambling. And historically, that's been absolutely male dominated. And football's been a big growth area. Revenues from football betting have pretty much doubled in the last five years, I think I'm right in saying. But typically women haven't been as interested in sports betting. So what the industry's done is it's taken things like slots bingo, online casino games, and sort of packaged them up in what they think are sort of women-friendly imagery. They've made them pink or whatever. That's not me saying that women like pink things, but this is what the industry is trying to do, right? And then advertising during loose women, for instance, and trying to hit that audience, because that's the only way that you can increase the pool of people that you're trying to speak to.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess there's a sense to which the sport is being slightly cheapened by stuff like this, or at least I feel it is. And maybe that's sanctimonious and maybe it's overly purest, but it is how I feel because the idea that it matters more when there's money on it is the sky slogan. And at the beginning of the football chapter, I compare that slogan with a quote by the great Danny Blancheflower, former Tottenham player, where he says the game is about glory, you know, the fallacy is that it's about winning, but the game is about glory, about going out there and playing with style and flourish about beating the opposition, not waiting for them to die of boredom. And you stack that up against that, it matters more when there's money on it. And I don't know. It's a little sickening to me anyway.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I haven't been able to get them at times. And this guy's sitting there looking at his phone. And I think even if you sort of put aside the potential harms of gambling, which you can't do, but even if you do that,”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not going to say the company. There was a gambling operator that had an advert, just in case I get the company wrong, where it sort of said, oh, I'm a nodder. I look up at the game, down on my phone, up at the game, down at my phone. And I just thought, I can't believe that's an advert. It feels really tragic to me as a kind of, I guess you could say a football purist. And, you know, it reminded me of there was a time when I was at the Tottenham Hotspare Stadium. I call it Whiteheart Lane, although that's not his name anymore technically. And there was a guy in front of me. And it was a tense game. I can't remember what it was, but I think, you know, the scores were even with not that long left. And there was a guy sitting in front of me. And, you know, this is a symptom of modern football to an extent. There's a lot of tourists in the ground. And he's looking at his phone deciding whether to cash out. And I just couldn't really believe it. I thought there are people who would love to have that seat. You know, I've got young relatives who've asked me to get them tickets for Tottenham games.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, and that's one thing I didn't mention earlier, actually. So, thank you for picking me up on it. When we talk about the combination of the smartphone and football betting, what that allowed was the big innovation came from Bet365, really, which was in play betting. So you're no longer betting on the score or the first goal scorer or maybe having a better half time on the end result. As you say, you're betting on next yellow card, the number of corners, the number of throw-ins. And you can do it at any time of the match. And suddenly betting on sport becomes kind of akin to playing a slot machine or playing roulette because you can keep feeding your steaks in. You can keep having another spin. If that one doesn't work out, you can do another one. It's sort of rapid fire high octane. And so that's something that came about. And as you say, the end result of that is that people are concentrating almost as much on the betting as they are on the football. They can't watch the game without betting. I think it was a...”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because he said that he had brokered their relationship with Bet Victor, an online betting company. He lost that case in the end. But what was revealed in the evidence was quite how reliant both industries have become on one another. And you had the gambling industry saying, you know, we really want to get into Liverpool and we're prepared to spend, I think it was $3 or $4 million quid on sponsoring the training kit. And then you add Liverpool in the other direction saying, you know, we need this money coming in because as we all know, fans want their clubs to spend as much as they possibly can on players. And we're all familiar with that. So they've become so intrinsically linked now that it seems almost impossible to unpick the two from one another now. I mean, we may get to a point where that happens via legislation, and that's something we can potentially come on to. But it didn't used to be that way.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Advertising hoardings around the side of the pitch, and there's some research that says that gambling logos can feature 700 times during a 90 minute match. That's without the adverts. So the game has become completely saturated by gambling imagery in a way that it just simply wasn't 15, 20 years ago. And I think it was in 2008, if I recall correctly, Middlesbrough were the only team with a gambling sponsor on their shirt. And now it's half the teams in the Premier League. And of course, there's an element of dependence going the other way, right? These are teams that are relying very heavily on the gambling sponsorship money that's coming in. And in the book, I documented a court case that I came across a couple of years ago, and it involved a guy who sort of brokered deals between football clubs and potential sponsors. He was a sort of middleman. He would connect them up and take a cut. And he was suing Liverpool.”
2022-02-28 · Intelligence Squared · Jackpot: How Gambling Conquered Britain, with Rob Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT