Simon Cox, the new chair of the BHA, says British racing is ready to work together, which would be marvellous news if anybody had written it down. Racing has been at a crossroads for so long that it has built a car park there, and what it needs now is not another conversation about which road to take but a signature at the bottom of a page.

I like what I have seen of him. Cox comes across as approachable, he listens, and I believe he genuinely wants to do the best he can for racing, which is not a sentence one can write about every holder of every office in every sport. Dr Jim Walker, the owners' chairman and a BHA board member, told the Racing Post he had spoken to him four times and found a considered man who listens before deciding.

But goodwill is not a governance structure. If a chair whom everybody is willing to succeed cannot turn warm words into signatures, it will not be for want of charm, and we should know why.

What He Said at Ascot

On Saturday 17 October, in his first broadcast interview since taking over on 1 October, Cox told a live audience at ITV Racing's Opening Show at Ascot that racing has no shortage of talent but does have a "coordination, cooperation and collaboration issue". After a few months of conversations, he said, he senses people recognise that the time has come to work together. He conceded that the present arrangements are far from ideal but thinks the problem solvable.

On government he was just as frank. Racing should not approach Westminster with a begging bowl but should show what it delivers, some 85,000 jobs and a sizeable contribution to the Treasury, while admitting that a strong anti-gambling sentiment could do real harm and that the sport's finances will suffer if the Budget goes wrong.

It is a good answer, and it is also, in the Racing Post's account, an impression rather than a commitment: no signatory named, no document produced, no date set. My inference is that the Treasury he is courting will ask who speaks for racing, and a page of signatures answers better than a warm atmosphere.

Cheap Talk Has Never Mended Anything

Economists call what Cox heard in all those meetings cheap talk: a statement that costs nothing to make tells you little about what the speaker will do, because the sincere and the insincere say it with equal ease. A promise made in a racing committee room has the shelf life of a sausage roll in a hospitality tent, whereas a costly signal, in which somebody actually surrenders something, is the only currency that separates a real intention from good manners.

Racing's own record sits uncomfortably beside the optimism: Lord Allen resigned in March after six months as chair, following a failure among the sport's bodies to agree governance changes, and by the end of September Ascot, Taunton and the Jockey Club had said they would leave the Racecourse Association at the end of the year. Those are the vital signs of a sport that agrees warmly in the corridor and divides cleanly in the committee room, where the biscuits are invariably better than the outcomes.

What Collaboration Actually Means

Cox used three words, and they are not synonyms. In my reading, coordination is two men agreeing to cross the road at the same moment, cooperation is declining to push the other under the bus, and collaboration is building the bus together, at a cost to each of you and with no guarantee that anybody will let you drive.

Racing manages the first two but struggles with the third, because collaboration is not consultation, which is asking people what they think, and it is not agreement, which is cheap while nothing is at stake. It is the moment somebody gives up something they hold in return for a share of something bigger.

The researchers are blunt about the conditions. Robert Axelrod's tournaments in the early 1980s found that cooperation survives between rivals who expect to meet again and who notice, and answer, defection, and Elinor Ostrom's work on shared resources found that groups which managed them well had clear rules, monitoring and graduated sanctions. Racing is a repeated game, since everybody will be back at Ascot next June, but a promise made in the hospitality marquee carries no penalty for being broken.

So real collaboration needs a loss, a written record of it, and a consequence for walking away.

Ten Years of Being Nice

By my count, collaboration by conversation has been racing's governing strategy for a decade or more: the working groups, the trials, the reviews with a cheerful name and a quiet funeral.

For 2027 the board has settled on 1,440 fixtures, eighteen fewer than this year's 1,458, which is the sporting equivalent of a diet that begins by leaving the parsley, even though the BHA acknowledged that many stakeholders wanted a significant cut, and the Professional Jockeys Association said it was surprised and called the decision risky.

Give Him Time, and Other Lullabies

The first stock defence is that the new chair has been in post for little more than a fortnight and deserves a honeymoon, and I accept it: a chair should be judged on the architecture he builds, not the paint he inherits.

But honeymoons turn expensive when the bills arrive on a fixed date, and this one arrives with the Budget on 28 October. Regulus Partners, the betting-industry consultancy, has modelled a doubling of Machine Games Duty from 20 to 40 per cent and concluded that racing would lose £92m a year, about a third of its betting income, a figure the BHA's Greg Swift repeated on 2 October. Regulus forecasts some 4,050 further shop closures, each costing racing roughly £6,000 in levy and about three times that in media rights, while other industry modelling puts the loss in levy and media rights at up to £40m.

Behind the arithmetic sit people, and I would ask you to hold on to that: every one of those shops has a manager, a kettle and a regular who has backed the same horse since the Falklands. Credit where it is due, Regulus did what too few in this sport do, which is put a number on the threat.

The second defence is that racing is a broad church. It is, but broad churches still manage to hold a service, and this one has not yet agreed on the time of it. The third is "it's complicated", and so is a hip replacement, but nobody asks the patient to attend ten more consultations before the surgeon picks up the scalpel.

One Page, One Signature, One Loss

So here is the test, and I stress that it is mine: a design of my own, and an inference about what would reveal intent, not anyone's policy. It takes a week and needs no consultants, which will alarm the consultants.

The universal ask goes to the BHA and every body below: sign a commitment to be open to whatever racing structure best serves the sport, including a commercial board. That means accepting in writing that your own powers, seats or very existence may be reduced or reallocated, ratified by your board or council, with a review timetable and no exemption for your own functions.

The new chair is entitled to go first, and the BHA signs before anyone else. Refusals arrive wearing the same coat: support "in principle", a carve-out for the signatory's own patch, or a condition that the new structure leaves their powers untouched.

Racecourses: Hand Over the Pen

The cleanest test of the lot costs the racecourses power rather than money. They agree that all races are scheduled and controlled by a central body, so scheduling stops belonging to the racecourses at all.

The loss is concrete. A course that holds a profitable Saturday, Bank Holiday or evening slot tends, in my inference, to guard it like a terrier with a sock, and under central control it becomes a date allocated by someone else. They must also surrender at least 12 per cent of fixtures, about 173 of the 1,440 on the 2027 list or roughly one in eight, on named dates, and the RCA cedes one of its two BHA board nominations to an independent.

Willingness is a signed transfer with no reserved veto and no condition that the central body's make-up favours the signatory. Refusal is "consultation rights" that amount to a veto, exemptions for contracted fixtures, cuts that fall only on rivals, or acceptance conditional on an independent board arriving first, and consultation in this sport is often a way of saying no slowly.

Bookmakers: Put Your Margin Where Your Mouth Is

Betting needs racing and racing needs betting, as Entain's Simon Clare told the new chair on the eve of his appointment, and the Regulus numbers show how tightly the two are bound.

The ask is a willingness to work with racing and bettors on terms that cost the bookmaker something real. The first loss is a cap on the margin built into each runner's price – the overround, which is the polite name for the part of the price that goes home in the bookmaker's pocket – and since overround is normally measured across a whole market the cap needs a published per-runner method. The second is a readiness to lay winning punters to some extent, giving up part of the freedom to limit their stakes, and the third is a commitment not to restrict or close accounts without good reason.

Willingness is a published commitment, signed by several operators rather than one, that names the cap and how it is measured, sets a minimum stake laid to winners, defines "good reason" in advance and offers an independent appeal. Refusal is "up to" figures, the cheapest phrase in commerce because they commit you to nothing and sound like a fortune, an undefined "good reason", or five men at the bar each discovering an interest in his shoes while waiting for another to commit first.

Everyone Else Gives Up Something Sharp

The Horserace Betting Levy Board gives up some of its freedom to change its mind, by ring-fencing a defined share of distributions to prize money and fixtures against agreed metrics. Willingness is a binding board resolution plus publication of fixture-level turnover data, which I have requested and which remains informally declined.

Owners, through the ROA, accept higher entry and registration fees in return for a guaranteed prize-money floor. It is survivable only if both are signed together, and a chairman's warm words are not a council vote.

Breeders, through the TBA, accept the pruning of Listed and lower black-type races, which costs some stock part of its pedigree value, in my inference. Quality is easy to love in general and hard to love when it is your Listed race, so the test is a named list of races to cut, publicly supported.

Trainers, through the NTF, accept binding entry rules with sanctions for non-runners and the removal of the lowest-grade races, which is my suggestion. The refusal is a pilot cheerfully endorsed and quietly ignored, with roughly the life expectancy of a gym membership in February.

Jockeys, through the PJA, accept fewer meetings and rides, which means fewer riding fees, and a cap on evening racing. The proof is written acceptance with an income estimate, before the fixture list is published rather than after.

Bettors: The Test I Set My Own Side

I sit on the committee of the Horserace Bettors Forum, so I would feel a fraud setting everyone else a test and exempting my own side. The test applies to the Forum as hard as to anyone, and these are my views rather than the Forum's.

The ask is a willingness to change how bettors are represented and to work with bookmakers so that both sides get better results. The loss is power, because the Forum gives up its position as sole independent voice for racing bettors in favour of a joint body or shared forum, perhaps with bookmaker-linked funding. Willingness is a ratified governance change, a joint programme with measurable outcomes for both sides, such as limits on restrictions placed on winning accounts traded for bettor-side commitments, and a review date, while refusal is public opposition alone, "dialogue" with no outcomes, or a joint body in name only.

My inference is that closer working with bookmakers risks capture, so willingness should also be judged by whether bettors keep a way to dissent, through published minority positions or independent funding.

How to Read the Answers

A loss accepted in writing, quantified, dated and binding is strong evidence of willingness, while "in principle" agreement, shifted losses and delay are the evasion patterns, which is my inference. A rational actor resists a pure loss, so refusal alone proves nothing: watch whether a body haggles over the size of the loss or rejects the principle.

Christmas, or Silence

Speed matters, and the calendar offers a deadline for free: the racecourse split takes effect at the end of the year, so the sport will restructure itself by accident unless it does so by design. My proposal is that Cox publishes the scorecard by Christmas, showing who signed, who refused and who haggled.

A new chair gets one honeymoon and one stock of favours, and the approachable manner that has won him so much goodwill is the asset to spend. It needs nothing from the Treasury, only nine signatures, and I may be wrong, in which case I will buy the first round and Cox, as a master brewer, can tell me whether it is any good.

If they do not sign, racing will have learned in ten weeks what ten years of dialogue never told it. Some of the people running these bodies will be cross with me, and I am sorry for that, but not for the point.

The sport has never lacked people who love it. What it lacks is a page with their names at the bottom.

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