Bookies are gambling with mental health

AS head of England’s mental health services, Claire Murdoch is ideally placed to speak out about the harrowing human cost of the gambling epidemic.

She’s seen the devastation wreaked by online betting sharks on society’s most vulnerable – a grim legacy of addiction, debt, family breakdown and suicide. Now in a damning letter to bookmakers’ chief executives, she warns: Enough is enough.

Enough rapaciously manipulating people into a ‘vicious gambling cycle’. Enough failing to stop occasional flutters turning into ‘dangerous habits’. And enough leaving the stretched NHS to ‘pick up the pieces’.

Her intervention is welcome. For the Mail has tirelessly campaigned to end bookies’ predatory tactics.

The relentless barrage of adverts aimed at inducing the young. The contemptible hooking of customers by ‘ cashback’ incentives. Or handing high-rollers VIP tickets to sporting events knowing they’ll squander several thousand pounds on bets.

Truly, the twisted morality is sickening. But why wouldn’t the firms deploy such perfidious tactics? They were given a green light by Tony Blair’s reckless 2005 liberalisation of the betting laws.

The then PM grotesquely wanted to make Britain a world leader in online gambling. Yet barely a week now goes by without fresh evidence of the pernicious consequences.

Ministers must now undo the appalling damage. But the time for tinkering at the edges is over. Firm action is needed to prevent the ruination of any more lives.