Afternoon:
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On the A1, a couple of hundred yards from the Emirates Stadium, is the new Leisure World amusement arcade. The local reaction gives you a taste of how the public will receive New Labour's planned casinos.
It's fair to say that everyone apart from owners and their dead-eyed customers hates it. The heads of five nearby schools are worried about their children being lured in. They protested, the police protested, shopkeepers protested. But although the council refused planning permission, a judge decided to overrule them all.
So angry is respectable opinion in Holloway that the arcade is being attacked from the moral high ground from an unlikely source: a pawnbroker. Andy Charalambous, who runs the Gold Shop a couple of doors away, said that desperate punters come in to pawn jewellery. Despite their business, he wants the arcade closed because "it brings the area down".
You might have thought the row about Labour's gaming plans stopped when Gordon Brown scrapped the proposal to build a supercasino in Manchester. But, for once, our hapless Prime Minister has been lucky with his PR. The death of supercasinos generated favourable headlines in papers as diverse as The Guardian and Daily Mail. But plans for 16 regional casinos will still be debated in the Commons this week.
The newspapers usually call them "smaller" casinos, but there is nothing tiny about the scale of gambling they will allow. People around the Arsenal are furious about 40 fruit machines in an arcade. The regional casinos will have 150 with jackpots of up to £4,000. The restraints that the Labour governments of the Sixties imposed on Britain's casinos will go. There will be drinks on the gaming floor, no cooling-off period before a new gambler is allowed to play and onsite sport betting. Beyond the regional casinos, New Labour has allowed tens of thousands of roulette machines in bookies, and poker and blackjack machines will follow soon.
It's not my vice, but I've nothing against gambling as long as there are sensible controls. But when it is exploding because of the internet, those controls need to be tightened, not loosened.
The net explains why Brown has chosen quietly to sneak down the permissive path: he is terrified tax revenues will vanish into cyberspace.
The result of his anxiety is an unsavoury double game. On the one hand, the press praises him for stopping supercasinos. On the other, Brown hopes no one will notice the thousands of new fruit machines and blackjack tables arriving soon in a casino near you.
