Gambling free-for-all

THE Mail warned again and again about the dangers of Tony Blair’s reckless liberalisation of gambling laws. Now barely a week goes by without new evidence of the pernicious consequences of the 2005 Gambling Act.

The explosion in fixed-odds betting terminals turned every high street bookmaker into a mini-casino, with machines which are so addictive they are compared to crack cocaine and which permit bets of £100 every 20 seconds.

Predictably, the number of problem gamblers doubled in the following decade. And with every addict comes a legacy of debt, family breakdown and social malaise – often concentrated in the country’s poorest communities.

Equally destructive was the decision to allow bookmakers to advertise on TV – not only after the watershed but before 9pm for live sporting events.

Anyone who watches football on television – including millions of children – can attest that advertising breaks are stuffed with gambling inducements such as free bets.

Indeed, the number of times a child is exposed to a TV gambling advert has ballooned from 450million a year to 1.4billion – figures which exclude the torrent of online adverts. The result: 25,000 children aged 11-16 are already classed as problem gamblers, with another 36,000 at risk. Behind the statistics are stories of individual lives destroyed by addiction.

Meanwhile, avaricious football clubs sell replica football shirts carrying gambling adverts to children as young as 14 and former professional footballers – who should be acting as role models – promote gambling firms on Twitter.

As the poll in yesterday’s Mail showed, two-thirds of teenagers say they feel bombarded with gambling adverts cynically designed to make betting look fun.

So shouldn’t that fact also be obvious to ministers who have a responsibility to protect young people against the gambling sharks preying on society’s most vulnerable?