Paving the way to taxing the Cause, not the Effect
I think it’s fair to say that Champion’s Day was a game of two halves. Half the meeting was only a surprise if you picked the wrong form horse, and the other won. Thus, TRAWLERMAN was a no-brainer, but started to drift like an unloved barge. CALANDAGAN was entirely plausible, and is off to Japan. MISSION CENTRAL was always doing just enough and was the 3rd favourite, and KALPANA beating ESTRANGE was correct with hindsight. Even the Balmoral was unsurprising, and I had three of the first five in my Trifectas - just not in the right place.
The shock winner of the G1 Sprint was possibly selectable if you had been watching him on the gallops and thought he was a slow developer. And that this improvement would see him improve 30lbs from his LTO and 20lbs from his career best. And gripe as much as one might / can/ shouldn’t, he did run a blinder. There was no pace collapse, and the results were pretty well in line with form, even the ex-Godolphin QUINAULT 66/1 3rd was understandable, as he had winning G3 form.
As regards the QEII, I fear we were up the garden path with CICERO’S GIFT. Firstly, he has had just 15 career runs. He’s been consistent this season with a win and a brace of seconds, but no one thought he’d handle the ground. He has pattern form, albeit listed, and he simply needed a career-best performance... which he produced. More importantly, if the sprinting division has been weak this year, the milers haven’t been much better. FIELD OF GOLD had a setback at Goodwood and hadn’t been seen for almost three months. In his absence, there wasn’t a sparkler that had lit up the division.
Anyway, we were all very pleased for Charlie, who needed that more than one perhaps thinks.
I don't understand why there is such a brouhaha over Cheltenham moving from Tues-Fri to Wed-Sat. The reason why I don’t vociferously care is, of course, that I don’t trail-hunt. Nor do walked-up pigeons, cull various types of does or bucks or generally venture out into the cold to march over ploughed bog. I used to Course a bit, which is now banned, and only replaced if you want to watch a whippet chase a plastic bag being towed by a bicycle.
No, what I do is watch the Rugby Internationals on the Saturday of Cheltenham week. I also—and I have checked back on the electronic papyrus—either prepare dinner for a dinner party for House guests staying over from Cheltenham or, more regularly, a large Sunday Lunch gathering in-house or down’troad. For the last eight years.
What I don’t do - and won’t - is go to Cheltenham on a Saturday, to get smashed up by a totally different racing crowd of crack-heads and rowdies. Frankly, when the only people who are telling you it will be alright are people who have hard-standing car parking spaces and a comfy box to sit in, despite the riot on the grandstand lawn, I am inclined to ask Joe Schmo, fan and Guinness drinker, for his input. And for a lot of them, the answer would appear to be: Nah, mate
So, happy to watch it on the box, in the pub before the Rugby. It’s why God invented King’s Ginger and Whisky and Bloody Marys and proper pubs with log fires.
As many of you will know by now, I have been repeatedly bleating about the tyranny of illogical socialist puritanism. It’s advocates are hellbent on killing gambling in this country, masked behind a total fake horror story of the cost to the NHS of the “scourge of gambling.”
According to their hymn-sheet, it is almost impossible to pop down to Aldi and not get splattered with the blood from an artery-slicing gambler, or have a body fall on you from the 35th floor of the tower block, when Mrs Snodgrass, (mother of nine) was being chased by some evil Irish bookie who has offices in Guatemala., after she had stoledn £2k from the Coop to satisfy her sordid lifestyle.
(As an aside, I wonder whether the Puritans’ cant isn't actually just AI-derived. They keep using the same adjectival shock-horror tropes.)
Today, my angst was fully justified, as the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), the regulatory arm of the UK Statistics Authority, has been forced to intervene following a political campaign that weaponised an incorrect interpretation of data on the economic costs of gambling harm.
At the heart of this flagrant misuse of existing figures is a key report from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID). It is an updated version of a 2021 study that estimated the financial cost of gambling harm at “more than £1bn a year.”
The usual suspects, like former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and several leftist think tanks, were accused of misquoting the report by using the figure to claim that the harm “…costs the NHS and other public services more than £1 billion a year.” The phrasing strongly implies a direct, causal link—that gambling causes this £1 billion-plus cost. However, in correspondence released under a FOI request, the OSR confirmed that the OHID report only identified costs ‘associated’ with problem gambling, not costs directly ‘attributed’ or ‘caused’ by it. There is a critical statistical difference: Association means two factors, like problem gambling and poor mental health, often occur together. Causality means one factor directly causes the other. As the OSR pointed out, this distinction was not “clearly understood by some users of the data,” including the think tanks IPPR and the Social Market Foundation.
To stop this nonsense from being repeated, especially as the figures are being used to lobby for a hike in gambling taxes, the OSR has finally stepped in. They have written to the OHID asking them to: “…include a prominent disclaimer or banner on the publication itself to clarify this point and help prevent misinterpretation.”
Meanwhile, and almost inevitably, while the OSR’s activity this week was focused on policing the use of statistics, the wider UK gambling statistics landscape continues to be shaped by the Gambling Commission, the only Quango actively working towards its own demise! They released yet more flawed data based on the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI). You know it’s tosh when someone makes a “Blue Peter” style barometer, which shows us all, just how well/badly we’re doing. Then they reminded everyone of their efforts to tackle illegal online gambling, a significant area of potential consumer harm, in which they are uniquely incapable of managing the non-existent crisis. They then discussed their considerable successes in killing the industry and driving punters into the illegal market by fining bookies for not being intrusive.
Talking of the ONS, they produced new figures this morning, showing that the UK borrowed £20.2bn last month, £1.6 billion more than 2024 and the highest since 2020. £7.2 billion higher than the Spring Statement forecast by the OBR… Total for the financial year is £99.8 billion, £11.5 billion more than last year and the second highest since 1993.
Phew, and I thought we had a problem