An Innocent Man: Gordon Brown and the ‘killing’ of the super casino
By Dan Waugh, Partner, Regulus Partners
The great British super-casino whodunit is replete with
enough twists, turns and intrigue to stand comparison with Agatha Christie’s
best yarns. Not simply a tale of mistaken identity, it may also prove to be a
case of a death faked; the perversion of the course of justice rather than
homicide.
The ‘crime’ in this instance was the killing of the British
super-casino (or ‘regional casino’ as it is known to legislation). The culprit,
according to popular lore is that great pantomime villain, Gordon Brown, the
conviction politician who brought his Presbyterian sense of morality to the
question of how and where people in Britain should be permitted to gamble.
At first glance, the facts fit. Under Blair our Britannia
was cool – perhaps not Vegas cool but closer in spirit to the Rat Pack than to
the Gang of Four. Blair gave Sir Alan Budd the freedom to review Britain’s
gambling laws through the eyes of an economist rather than a moralist – and he
decided as many other governments have done (including those to the left and to
the right in Beijing and Singapore) that destination casinos or integrated
resorts were good. Brown’s premiership was a correction to all that. It was
back to basics (again) - a time for Labour to sober up after the party turned sour
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At the start of 2007 with Blair as PM, the Gambling Act
(despite a tumultuous passage) had been in place for a year-and-a-half and we
were on course for our first super-casino. By the end of the year, with Brown
in Number 10, hopes for ‘Brit Vegas’ had been consigned to the dustbin. The
‘Son of the Manse’, cheered on by gambling’s bogeyman (and editor of the Daily
Mail) Paul Dacre had prevailed by stopping Blair’s folly in its tracks.
Only it wasn’t quite like that…
According to voting records, Gordon Brown’s sole
parliamentary involvement with the regional casino was an affirmative vote in
March 2007, when the House of Commons endorsed the Casino Advisory Panel’s
decision to award the licence to Manchester (along with the allocation to other
local authorities of the eight ‘large’ and eight ‘small’ casino licences). I
don’t know (and don’t particularly care) whether Brown’s conscience was
troubled in voting for the measure. His vote was consistent with his priorities
at the time (as boss of the Treasury) to attract investment to the UK.
The truth is that plans for integrated resorts and
destination gaming were killed in the Lords and not in the Commons. In a
monumental act of folly, Blackpool’s unsuccessful bid team persuaded a
sufficient number of misty-eyed peers to form a united front with the
anti-gambling lobby in order to defeat the statutory instrument.
Brown’s role in all of this was to persuade his culture
secretary, Tessa Jowell to decouple the regional casino from the other 16
licences. His government probably could have pushed it through but Brown’s own
interests had shifted with the move to Number 10. Rather than killing the
super-casino, Brown’s role was to turn off the life-support machine.
Only it’s not quite like that either…
The intriguing fact behind all of this is that the regional
casino isn’t dead after all. Look – it’s sitting right there in primary legislation
– on the face of the Gambling Act. All that is required is the political will
to resubmit the enabling legislation; and this is something that may not be as
difficult as is commonly supposed.
If the decision to award the regional casino to Manchester
was returned to Parliament, it is difficult to believe that Blackpool City
Council would be sufficiently exercised to protest this time; while the
backdrop of the FOBT controversy might even help to emphasise the virtues of
destination gambling over the convenience market. Whoever wins the General Election in May will need to address the Budget deficit - and this will require
investment ideas as well as simple tax-raising. Meanwhile, the opening of
Genting’s Resorts World at the NEC will have helped to reframe thinking about
how gambling can be harnessed to more productive economic ends.
What is really needed is not so much political will but
industry ambition – for someone to paint a picture of what the regional casino
(probably but not necessarily in Manchester) might look like – what amenities
it would incorporate, how many jobs it would create, how much investment it
would attract, how much it would generate in taxes, how it would support
tourism and (importantly) explain convincingly how inevitable concerns about social responsibility can and will be effectively addressed.
This sense of ambition has not hitherto come from within the
domestic industry, while many of the global titans of casino (such as MGM, Wynn,
Las Vegas Sands and Crown) have bad memories of Britain as a place to do
business. They may also be too besotted with the prospect of integrated resorts
in Japan to bother about a return to our small island. And yet…..
And yet, Europe remains a major gambling market that the big
operators have yet to crack. Investments in Britain by Genting, Crown and
Caesars were effectively market entry plays and remain fairly marginal in terms
of their global businesses. Meanwhile, Sands may now ‘own’ the customer in most
of the major gambling markets in the world – Las Vegas, Macau, Singapore – but
not in Europe.
There was a time when some very bright minds (in government,
in academe, in industry) considered that destination casinos would work in
Britain and work for Britain. It may not be in vogue to say so today but that is no
reason to disregard their considered work on the subject.
The super casino is not dead; it is simply sleeping. It
pricked its finger on a spinning wheel and now waits for Prince Charming (Prince
Steve, Prince Sheldon, Prince Jim, perhaps even a homespun Prince….) to bring it back to life.
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