Is This Man UK Horseracing’s Greatest Threat?

There’s a new figure skulking in the stables of power, and he’s not here for the paddock pies or a flutter on the 3:15 at Newbury. He’s here for Reform. Regulation. Responsibility. That most joyless of modern cults: “evidence-based policy.” Enter Aveek Bhattacharya—a man whose name sounds like a jazz-fusion saxophonist, but who in reality is the softly-spoken spectre now lurking in the Treasury, holding a PhD and possibly a grudge against fun.

Bhattacharya, a former Senior Policy Analyst at the Institute of Alcohol Studies, now floats like a ghost through the corridors of the Treasury. No tie. No Twitter meltdowns. No political selfies. Just ideas. Dangerous ones and he is not another Darwin. He’s the man who once spent his career telling you to put down the pint, and now he wants you to rethink your relationship with the bookies—and the horses.

He’s also the man with possibly five mysterious staff working under him, an LSE PhD, and the apparent belief that British traditions are things to be gently smothered with policy papers and moral gravitas. And right now, he has racing in his sights. Bhattacharya doesn’t shout. He doesn’t grandstand. But that makes him more dangerous. He isn’t trying to ban horseracing—that would be too crude. What he’s doing, possibly, is building the intellectual case to quietly redirect the money, dismantle "the subsidy", and replace it with something socially purposeful.

Bhattacharya isn’t just another anonymous Treasury advisor with a dull tie and a forgettable LinkedIn. He’s a former Senior Policy Analyst at the Institute of Alcohol Studies, a think tanker at the Social Market Foundation, and a man who built a career arguing that industries built on pleasure are inherently harmful. Now he’s in government. Officially impartial. Unofficially, ideologically committed to turning your vice into public health revenue.

The Man Who Taxed You For Your Own Good

Aveek’s worldview is crystal clear: everything fun is harmful, and must be either re-educated or regulated. His time at the SMF was spent campaigning for a statutory levy on gambling operators—a sort of sin tax for the 21st century, aimed at funding addiction treatment, research, and possibly a few vegan meditation pods.

The logic? Gambling causes harm. Let the industry pay.

And yet, right now, the biggest compulsory gambling tax we have—the Horserace Betting Levy—is funnelled directly into keeping horseracing alive, with only 1.5% going to anything resembling compassion or care.

So here’s the question Aveek surely whispers into his eco-silk pillow at night: Why do we protect the horses but abandon the humans?

How is it that a horse who breaks its leg at Cheltenham gets a medical team, a helicopter, and a eulogy, but Barry from Scunthorpe—who’s just blown his wages on mobile blackjack—gets a leaflet and a phone number?.

Five Staff, Zero Transparency, and a Mission to Nudge

Of course, Aveek doesn’t act alone. He’s said to have "five direct reports" in the Treasury, and no one’s quite sure what they do and whether they are pretending to work from home. The department, when pressed, responds with a level of secrecy that suggests they’re building a virtual time machine, not reforming gambling tax.

Speculation ranges from the ridiculous to the plausible: drafting a full Gambling Equity Index, developing a Social Purpose Algorithm for bookmakers, or designing a prize-linked savings scheme in which nobody wins, but everyone feels emotionally validated and irritated by any Racing strike.

But here’s the terrifying part: Bhattacharya’s silence is his power. He’s not some loud crusader with a vendetta against Ladbrokes. He’s far more effective: a quiet intellectual with data, credibility, and access to Rachel Reeves’ inbox and tissue stockpile.

Which means racing—that mad, glorious, deeply flawed beast of a sport—is now being measured not by passion or pageantry, but by spreadsheet and social harm metric fuelled by an anti-gambling mailchimp list.

Racing vs Recovery: Pick a Side

What Britain needs, Bhattacharya might argue, is not to destroy horseracing, but to stop pretending it's a charitable cause.

The current logic is upside-down: we subsidise a sport that kills animals, fuels addiction, and benefits land-owning elites, while addiction treatment services are forced to rely on voluntary donations and hope.

It’s like funding cockfighting with sugar tax revenues while NHS diabetes clinics hold bake sales.

Bhattacharya’s vision, for all its wonkish coldness, asks an uncomfortable truth: Why are we still propping up the sport of kings when we won’t even fund help for the people it breaks?

So the real question is: Can someone with Bhattacharya’s record be trusted to play fair with horseracing? Or is he simply the Trojan Horse—minus the horse—of the technocratic anti-gambling class?

Racing’s Greatest Threat? Or Its Most Rational Critic?

To racing traditionalists, Aveek Bhattacharya is a threat—a cardiganed assassin with a calculator, poised to re-route the river of gambling money away from prize money and into emotionally intelligent psychiatric clinics.

To others, he’s a necessary corrective to decades of madness—a man brave enough to ask whether this national obsession with horses and hedges should finally be turned into a footnote.

So is this man racing’s greatest threat?

Not because he’ll say so. But because he doesn’t have to.

His ideology speaks for him. His record speaks for him. And unless the Treasury stops pretending civil servants have no biases, British racing may soon be another national habit quietly “nudged” into extinction.

The next time the Levy is “reviewed,” don’t be surprised if the sugar cube goes to the spreadsheet—and not the horse.

Odds on Aveek reforming the system? 3/1.
Odds on him becoming racing’s public enemy number one?
Even money.

https://www.smf.co.uk/commentary_podcasts/horses-for-courses-betting-taxes/