Bamboozled and bewildered

I am in despair… I do not have the brainpower to understand the dichotomies that racing keeps creating for itself. What’s worse is that they all smack of the ill-considered suicide note.

In no particular order, Peter Savill has launched his Professional Racing Association, which has some 30 racecourses and some 150 trainers on board, essentially creating a pressure group whereby all racecourses commit to a level of 30% of raceday revenues being redistributed as prize monies. Those failing to commit will face a collective action in 2025, where the PRA members will boycott them. The greatest protagonist of the scheme is ARC, who is threatening legal action. Savill repeated that threat last weekend, warning that courses that did not meet the one-third target set by the PRA would not feature on an approved list of fixtures. And then he said, and then they said,… schism looms.

Ed Dunlop spends the next year worrying that he might lose his licence, yard, horses, and business because somehow, a microscopic amount of cocaine ended up in LUCIDITY’s bloodstream, and because his name is on the licence, he takes the rap - which isn’t a £1k fine, but a one-year ban.

Strict and fair rules, but as the BHA would have it, fostered with some charity. Huzzah, says Col. Gatling-Bren. Our sport has no place for such goings on. Quite right - but as you swerve chucking any stones at the glass house, have you ever tested the tops of the lavatories in the Jockey Club rooms? Would you like a small side bet that I know what you would find? I remember a Red Top once tested the Member's lavatories at The House of Commons and the loos at Lambeth Palace, and it was apparently like a South American street market on a Friday morning!

Do we test the work riders in charge of a 1000lb of 35mph blood, bone and muscle? Every day? Everyone? The Muckers-out? How? Who could even carry out such work? So it has to be random, and then, on testing positive, what is the approach? Sack them? Help them? Where are the finances for the support? The consumption numbers, too, are horrific. We know we are talking about a national figure of 1 in 10 - but the under-25s are 1 in 5! Perhaps the impetus for taking drugs is the peer pressure from mates, but might it have anything to do with issues surrounding riding weights? Oh please, don’t be so silly. The next thing you know, you’ll be saying that finding a jockey who can ride at 8st soaking wet is difficult. No, Colonel, you’re right, and anyway, those stats were way back almost six years ago, so it must have got so much better since then… what with lockdown and Covid and all,

I don't know the answer, but it isn't asking Ed Dunlop to live in fear of losing his reputation and livelihood because society doesn’t operate as it should.

Wait, though, here we are making a fuss about illegal drug taking—when the pernicious addiction is gambling—because, of course, today is the day that the £500 losses per month rule kicks in before spot checks are started. This then reduces to £150 in February. And it's about time, too. How can the Government know who to tax until the bookmakers submit all the gathered financial details to the Gambling Commission and then on to HMRC? Of course, this scheme will work and will end all gambling addiction. It will drive no one into the arms of the black market and will not kill the on-course betting market or the racing industry. I suppose there was a time when we could have said No to the bookmakers and told the Government we would stick with a PMU-style Tote monopoly rather than be bled dry over the next 80 years. All it required was some bottle, imagination and leadership. Yes, we would have had Woodrow for a while, but that would have been a small price to pay. But wait a moment….

Surely an addiction which we can stop is smoking? Think of the harm and the almost 75,000 people who die directly from smoking - because, like all data supplied by the NHS - who, as we know from Lucy Letby’s trial - is incapable of obfuscating or getting a figure wrong. The figure is arrived at by taking a percentage of X disease and Y this and Z That, and multiplying it by the knowledge gained from A and adding to the sum of B - et voila. 74,600 or 80,000 as Circa Starmer finds it easier to pronounce. One way to usefully end smoking is to make customers who are enjoying themselves leave a racecourse in the great outdoors to walk out onto the countryside road or to walk off down the High Street to have a fag. Inevitably we will, I suppose, discover what happens if you return to your car parked on the racecourse and then have a fag inside. Are you now smoking indoors on a racecourse? And if that, then what about alcohol?

James Tucker, who handles Data & Analysis in the Social Care and Health Division of the ONS, said:

"Alcohol-specific deaths have risen sharply since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with alcoholic liver disease the leading cause of these deaths. This rise is likely to be the result of increased alcohol consumption during the pandemic. Research has suggested that people who were already drinking at higher levels before the pandemic were the most likely to have increased their alcohol consumption during this period."

Valuable insight, James. So… people who were predisposed to drink more pre-lockdown drank much more during lockdown, perhaps when they were depressed. Well, standby, James, because there is a Tsunami of depression coming your way, and it’s time, I think, to get the banning boots on because that number James is referring to is 9641 UK deaths or 11,000, as Circa would call it.

But wait again, I say. That’s UK deaths, and it’s very easy to get confused between ONS figures and NHS figures because they use different reporting models. So, Alcohol-specific and Alcohol-attributable are two distinct species, and England had 7,600 deaths, which may or may not have been specific but were almost certainly attributable.

So nationally, we care desperately about smoking but not about drugs. We care desperately about gambling and will soon care about alcohol and obesity - always remembering that this can only be effectively policed if the neighbour reports the neighbour and the locals dob the landlord of the local so that he loses his licence.

Some people are already practising to be selected as area wardens for Starmer’s surely-soon-to-come Ministry for State Security, for example, reporting Kirstie Allsopp to Child Welfare for letting her 16 yo (shy 3 weeks) take a train to Europe. The mindset for IngSoc is already being whipped into shape by the Guardian’s writers with their Triple-cooked shoulder chips. Here is a piece that is an excellent example of Orwellian propaganda: ignorant, spiteful, class-abhorrence based on 80-year-old prejudices masquerading as modern thinking, dripping from the pen of a miserable millennial.)

As I’m carted off to the San, with a cream cake in my gob, a bottle of the Dows ‘67 on a drip feed in my right arm, and some Ket feeding the catheter in my left arm, please can someone tell Mr Chow of Supplies Supplies Dark Web Bookmakers¹ that I’d like a £50 double on Jan Breughel and Economics—and then light this Romeo No 4, which seems to have gone out?

One last throw of the dice.

Meanwhile, here are a few selections for Saturday: