Duty to Disintegrate

1. The pitch that isn’t what it says on the tin

The Social Market Foundation is trumpeting a new fiscal cure-all: Remote-Gaming Duty on online slots up from 21 % to 50 % (Derek Webb, millionaire ex-poker pro, says 60 % would be “braver”), every other sport shunted to 25 %, and horseracing wrapped in a 5 % comforter. The Treasury press office swears it will raise £2 billion and “reduce gambling harm”. A 39 page report that could be summarised in 6 bullet points, is embellished to give its superficiality credibility and possibly increase the fees of its authors.

Look closer and you find no fresh clinical evidence, no behavioural modelling, and only a single 2019 bar chart as economic scaffolding. This isn’t medicine – it’s a score-settling exercise dressed in a white coat. This strategy is neutralise racing and get at the slots but whatever you do maximise the impact on gambling and hit it hard.

2. Meet the travelling medicine show

• Dr James Noyes – Cambridge PhD turned Social Market Foundation fellow, better known in the industry as “Affordability-Check Man.” He wants punters to supply payslips, mortgage statements and a passing knowledge of Pythagoras before they can press Spin.

• Alex Ballinger MP – former Royal Marine, now Labour’s ration-sergeant for recreational spending.

• Martin Cruddace – chief executive of Arena Racing, permanent maître-d’ of the paddock, topping up Pommery while murmuring “save the gee-gees.” A man who will do anything to protect Ruebens Brothers bottom line.

Together they’ve written or chatbotted Duty to Differentiate. On paper it’s a public-health strike on “high-harm” products. In practice it’s a fiscal grenade lobbed at the digital casinos that have been eating the high-street bookies’ lunch for a decade.

3. The Cheltenham déjà-vu – and the Eurostar irony

Noyes’s last big idea, a £100-a-month loss trigger, shrank Cheltenham turnover faster than a soggy bar tab. Now he wants to tie that paperwork mountain to a 50-(or 60-) per-cent tax rise, depending what Derek thinks. Ordinary backer? Fork over your banking history to get £70 on a novice hurdler at Plumpton – a sum that won’t buy Noyes a second-class Eurostar ticket to Paris, let alone bankroll addiction treatment.

Meanwhile the same artificial-intelligence tools bookmakers use to close down any account that dares show a profit will continue to let binge-losers spin unhindered until the affordability robot finally notices. Quick to block winners; snoozy with losers – but sure, tell us again how this is about harm.

4. Racing’s velvet cushion – removal date pencilled in

On first read the 5 % headline rate looks like a gift to a sport battling thin mid-week crowds, flat media rights and Brexit labour shortages. Indeed, The Guardian just quoted National Trainers’ Federation boss Paul Johnson giving the plan his “full backing”, believing bigger taxes on casinos will “protect the sport”.

He may want to read the small print. The 5 % pamper works only while the Treasury’s £2 billion mirage materialises. Miss that target – and basic maths says the Chancellor will twist the softest dial in reach. Racing, now isolated from the rest of the betting lobby, will be standing alone when the axe returns in 2027. The SMF man in the Treasury is ready to press the enter button and he sees no value in racing at all.

5. Enter Derek “Sixty-Per-Cent” Webb and Nigel Farage

PoliticsHome revealed last week that Webb – Labour’s fifth-biggest donor (2023-24) and solid supporter of Noyes’s SMF work – is “open to engaging Reform UK” about turning the tax screw even tighter. So the cardigan-wearing anti-slots crusader could soon be arm-in-arm with Nigel Farage, pint aloft, both chanting “bash the reels”.

It’s professional wrestling: different costumes, same finishing move on the online-casino industry – and racing’s grandees are applauding from the cheap seats, unaware the confetti is shredded betting slips.

6. The black-market boomerang

A future punter’s choice:

• UK-licensed brand, 2026: odds trimmed to fund a 60 % duty, upload your council-tax bill, dog’s microchip and maybe a sonnet about disposable income, then press Spin.

• Curaçao crypto-casino, today: 98 % return-to-player, zero ID, instant Tether withdrawal.

Even a modest 5 per-cent exodus nukes roughly £800 million – almost the entire gap between Treasury fantasy and ledger reality – and every safer-gambling levy disappears offshore with it. Yet the policy’s annex contains no hard modelling of channel shift: acknowledging it would blow the entire “harm-reduction” sales pitch.

7. Greyhounds today, Derby tomorrow

Once slots sit at 60 %, Westminster will glance down the duty table: greyhounds at 25 %, ponies at 5 %. When “fairness” mode kicks in, racing’s cushion becomes a neon bull’s-eye. The very plan sold as protection quietly isolates the sport so it can be milked later, when the orange highlighter returns to the Budget spreadsheet.

8. Levy limbo and the joys of ministerial meddling

To pin racing’s 5 % rate, ministers must smash the glass on Britain’s arcane Levy – historically negotiated between racing and bookmakers, not the Treasury. Precedent set, every future Chancellor now owns a dial labelled “Tax the fillies”. If you think they won’t twist it, you probably also think the bar chart was statistically robust.

Horseracing is forever sold as the noble “game of skill” – Sherlock Holmes with a race-card, all binoculars and Beyer figures. Lovely theory. Reality? The instant you actually demonstrate that skill, the trading algorithm slams the panic button like a toddler on a lift panel. One winning bet on a hurdler at Fakenham and – abracadabra! – your maximum stake resembles the price of a Freddo, the “best-odds” icon evaporates, and promotional emails switch from “Price Boost!” to “Kindly Close the Door on Your Way Out.”

9. A simpler, duller, but effective alternative to "Gambling Harm" (which no one will headline)

• Slow the spin cycle, cap stakes.

• Make AI flag binge-losers with the same zeal it flags arbers.

• Ring-fence a modest mandatory levy for treatment, audited independently.

• Treat black-market enforcement like HMRC treats VAT fraud.

All doable, all boring, none of it delivers the visceral thrill of clobbering “Big Gambling” with a fiscal cricket bat – so it was left on the policy shelf.

10. Final furlong

Duty to Differentiate claims public-health credentials; it really potentially offers:

• No new evidence of addiction reduction.

• AI aimed at winners, not losers.

• A black-market growth plan assembled by accident.

• Racing leaders groomed to cheer while their future revenue stream is pencilled for 2027 claw-back.

• Noyes & Farage starring as moral twins and Derek Webb’s cheque-book as a supporting cast.

Give it two years: punters VPN-hop, operators flag-hop, Ballinger issues digital ration coupons, and somewhere Webb and Farage clink glasses on a Goodwood balcony. Addiction? Still there – only now it pays its taxes in crypto.