Philip Johnston:

From gambling to gold, our politicians’ economic and legislative vandalism is rarely properly punished

For years, Westminster has been the scene of appalling goings-on. Behind the palace’s Gothic revivalist façade, MPS have engaged in the most dreadful abuse. Their victims are legion; and we are not talking about a wandering hand on an unwilling knee or an inappropriate comment about a parliamentary aide’s breasts.

These parliamentary scandals are not sexual or financial but legislative. While MPS fret about whether they will be exposed for some drunken fumble 15 years ago or vie with one another to burnish their credentials as doughty, if belated, champions of their harassed staff, the rest of us have to live with the consequences of the laws they pass.

Since it is back in the news, let us take as an example the liberalisation of gambling controls in 2005. The Government has just announced another consultation on whether to re-impose some restraints, including limits on the stakes allowed on fixedodds betting terminals (FOBTS). These offer high-speed gambling so addictive to the inveterate punter that they have been dubbed “the crack cocaine of the high street”.

There are 34,000 machines in Britain and it is possible to bet up to £300 a minute. One proposal is to reduce the maximum stake to £20, or even £2. One study found that in 2014 some £13billion was wagered on FOBTS by the poorest 25 per cent of England’s population and more than £400million was lost. The country’s 55 most deprived boroughs contain 2,691 betting shops – far more than wealthier areas. The consultation points out that over the past 10 years an additional two million people have been “identified as being at risk of problem gambling”.

It adds: “Gambling-related harm goes wider than the harm experienced by those identified as problem gamblers and also affects families of gamblers, their employers, communities and society more widely.” Who knew? Well, just about everybody. Labour’s Tom Watson was on the radio yesterday blaming the Conservatives for failing to deal with a problem that the Labour government created. He said it was not known in 2005 that internet gambling would grow so fast or that high street betting shops would be taken over by machines.

Yet at the time, campaigners warned Labour ministers what would happen if they relaxed the law. The Royal College of Psychiatrists, among others, called the legislation a “recipe for disaster”.

Before provisions in the Gambling Act 2005 came into force, only bingo and lotteries could advertise on TV. Today it is hard to escape them, especially if you watch sport. Every break is an entreaty to part with your money by predicting who will score the next goal or take the next wicket. Even so, the review does not recommend any curbs, despite pressure from campaign groups.

Plenty of people enjoy the odd flutter without it risking their jobs and marriages. Instinctively, I am against the nanny state and dislike being lectured by self-appointed moral guardians about what I should and should not do. People can decide for themselves whether to bet; but it is not for the government to facilitate their ability to do so, not least because gambling demoralises society by breaking any link between effort and reward.

Moreover, it has always been known that some addictive personalities are vulnerable to the temptations of gambling, which was why restrictions were placed on it. A report by the industry regulator, the Gambling Commission, earlier this year found that 43 per cent of people who use the fixed-odds machines are problem or at-risk punters.

It could be argued that these people need to be responsible for their own actions, though many get the money to fuel their habit from theft or fraud which affects others. The bookies say thousands of jobs and nearly £1billion in gaming duty will be lost if the Government is too heavy-handed. That may be true. But this could all have been avoided had Parliament not reformed the law in the first place. And even though the measures were partially watered down by Gordon Brown, when he abandoned a network of planned super-casinos, the damage was done.

Indeed, for Mr Brown as Chancellor, gambling was an important source of revenue to squander on his big state ambitions. Whether he admits as much in his new memoirs, My Life, Our Times, due out next week, I am not sure since I have not read them yet. But we do know from serialised extracts that Mr Brown believes “rogue” financiers responsible for the 2008 crash should have been sent to prison. He says the failure to punish them properly means it is “inevitable” that they will start gambling again with public money.

This, remember, is from a man who sold 60 per cent of the nation’s gold reserves despite serious misgivings from the Bank of England. Subsequent apologists say he was right to have done so because holding gold is a pointless activity for a state. But he would have gained a better price by waiting and lost £3billion in the process, or rather the taxpayer did, and he was warned of the risk.

This is also from a former Chancellor whose first Budget in 1997 siphoned more than £10billion a year out of Britain’s pensions system and diverted the cash to unproductive public spending. He judged that companies could afford to surrender the tax concession on dividends without damaging the pensions. He was wrong. But more than that, an internal Whitehall paper released in 2007 under Freedom of Information laws predicted a drop of up to £75billion in the overall private pension pot. Yet Mr Brown ploughed ahead, an act of political and economic vandalism whose consequences continue to reverberate.

In his book, Mr Brown says bankers risk causing another crash because “mistakes of the past have not been heeded”. Yet, as he and his colleagues have demonstrated over the years, if there is one institution that fails to learn the lessons of history it is Parliament. If the financiers are going to end up in prison, I can think of a few politicians who should share a cell with them, and I don’t mean the gropers.