No Runners, No Riders, No Clue

Someone’s trying to get a message across like a starter with a megaphone in a 30-runner novice chase

So here it comes with plenty of fanfare, like a Derby ushered in with fireworks. Wednesday 10th September — a day which should’ve featured the usual midweek mix of class six mayhem at Uttoxeter and Kempton kickbacks under the lights — but instead became the first official strike day in British racing history. Fixtures scrapped. Cards shuffled. Trainers baffled. Punters fuming. The Racing Post looking like it just published the shipping forecast. We will call it a strike, not re-arranged racing, we need to be over dramatic!

This wasn’t about rain, snow, or equine flu — it was a self-inflicted blackout. The BHA’s attempt to send a message to government by cancelling four meetings, rescheduling them like leftover turkey, and herding owners, jockeys and political lobbyists to Westminster in the hope that someone, somewhere, in Labour HQ might say, “Ah yes, horse racing — isn’t that the one with Frankie Dettori and posh people with big hats?”

In theory, it’s a bold move. In practice, it looked like a desperate lunge from a sport already hurtling towards the third fence on a long run-up with one shoe missing.

Because this wasn’t a grand national protest — it was a novice political campaign, full of awkward declarations, recycled soundbites, and a hashtag petition that had less traction than a Landrover Discovery on soft ground at Catterick.

And while the sport huddled outside Westminster hoping Rachel Reeves might glance up from a spreadsheet with negatives long enough to notice, the real agenda — gambling reform, tax harmonisation, political capital — was being driven by people who actually know how to run a campaign, not just a hospitality box for the APPG. If racing actually wants saving, it better stop sounding like a hedge fund asking for a heritage plaque

Racing’s version of a revolution: slightly rescheduling Kempton Park

Now, when most industries go on strike, things fall apart. When train drivers down tools, the country collapses into a Mad Max-style barter economy. When nurses protest, people die. When horseracing goes on strike?

They move Lingfield Park from Wednesday to Monday.

I mean, this is the politest insurrection in British history, apologies to Dave Yates. Next they’ll be storming Parliament with little tweed pitchforks, yelling, “Save the gentry’s gambling margins!” This hasnt worked before.

Even the choice of day is telling: September 10th, the day before the St Leger Festival — just enough of a tantrum to look dramatic, but not enough to risk anyone’s profits. You know, like a diet where you eat fewer biscuits between the cakes.

“Harmonised tax rates”? Like treating horses and fruit machines the same? Heaven forbid!

At the heart of the uproar is the Treasury’s apparent plan to “harmonise” online gambling taxes — aligning horserace betting with the rates applied to online slots and casino games. This, apparently, is sacrilege.

Martin Cruddace of Arena Racing Company even said, and I quote, that horseracing is “not available every ten seconds, twenty-four hours a day.”

No — it’s just a year-round 363 day all weather, multi-billion-pound enterprise that encourages you to chuck cash at a sport you don’t understand, based on a man called Luke who also doesnt understand in a shiny suit and cap shouting tips on ITV4, that he doesnt back himself.

But sure, tell me again how this is morally superior to spinning a virtual roulette wheel at 3am while in your Calvin Kleins.

Winners are banned, overrounds are rising — and yet you want special treatment?

Here’s a thought: should racing actually be treated any differently from the digital slot machine and blackjack brigade?

After all, the betting industry attached to this sport — the one pleading poverty and threatening an equine blackout — is currently banning punters for winning. Not cheating. Not insider knowledge. Just... winning.

Try backing a few too many 10/3 winners in a week and your account will be locked faster than a supermarket trolley in a puddle. Apparently, profitability only works one way in this sacred economy.

And let’s not forget the overrounds — those lovely little margins baked into odds like mould in a student fridge. Ten years ago, you might get a fair market. Now? The average punter’s operating at a 130% book and still being told to enjoy the "competitive racing product". Solving the puzzle, dont pay man, tell Hoilles

It’s not a betting ring anymore — it’s a rigged tombola being spun by a man in a Barbour jacket, while Arena charges £8.50 for a pint of Guinness and tells you it’s “part of the theatre”.

And now the slow bleed becomes a haemorrhage

Let’s be clear: if betting taxes go up, overrounds will rise even further. Fewer promotions. More account closures. Prices get worse. Value disappears. Punters give up, or worse — drift to the black market and crypto casinos run out of the back of someone's Honda Civic in Gibraltar. The £500 million of intermediary funds becomes £400M quite easily without the "racing tax". Its their bottom line thats the only valid metric! Hit the bookies racing suffers.

Bookies will pull advertising, sponsorship dries up,media rights become media responsibilities and racing’s glossy ecosystem — the silk, the fizz, the fake patriotism all all its bullshit — starts contracting faster than Liz Truss’s political legacy.

And the tragedy? This was entirely avoidable.

Racing had twenty years to diversify its income. Two whole decades to do something, anything, other than stick the begging bowl out and hope Bet365 would top it up again. But it didn’t. It built no plan, no audience strategy beyond “old blokes and some hen dos”, no digital evolution worth the name.

Now it’s standing in the rain with no umbrella, trying to blame the storm.

The industry’s had more working groups than a think tank on meth — and somehow, not one of them delivered a solution that didn’t start with “more fixtures” and end with “more betting revenue”. It’s been trying to grow a sport by growing its addiction wing.

And now it wants the Treasury to panic over a house it built on sand, near a bookie, with a sign outside that says Please Gamble Responsibly. Wink wink!

The tax hypocrisy no one wants to mention

But hang on — before we start carving bronze statues of Red Rum outside Number 10, let’s take a peek behind the stable door.

Some of the racecourses involved in this noble protest movement haven’t paid corporation tax in years. Why? Because they’ve discovered that hefty offshore interest payments — the sort that make Starbucks look like a model taxpayer — can wipe out your profits faster than a pulled-up favourite at Chepstow.

So we’re left with the burning question: is this a grassroots sport worth saving, or a billionaire’s playground asking the taxpayer for pocket money?

Can UK racing, hand on heart, argue to be made a “special case” when it operates like a Guernsey tax vehicle dressed as Downton Abbey with broodmares?

The truth is that the sport’s current campaign is about as convincing as a student union petition to bring back Top Gear. We’ve had a meaningless online petition, a slogan with a hashtag, and a BHA campaign that claims to be “getting traction” because a few bored MPs said some vaguely nice things in the Commons between phone-checks.

Meanwhile, the anti-gambling lobby is outgunning the sport on every front — conferences, research papers, political briefings, TikTok-friendly influencers with charity funding, and PowerPoint decks that actually get read in Whitehall.

They’ve got the narrative, the momentum, and crucially, the moral high ground — a weapon racing hasn’t wielded since Lester Piggott went to prison for tax evasion.

Please, don’t wheel out Gosden. Or anyone with a voice like a decanter of port

Memo to the BHA: do not put John Gosden on the front line again. Or any trainer who sounds like they keep a Labrador named Winston and say “rather!” when ordering coffee. And definitely don’t parade another racecourse CEO around who treats the sport like a theme park for pensioners with gout.

You’re trying to win over Labour MPs now — the “chatting classes” from the Midlands marginals, not the House of Lords gin committee. The kind of MP who spent August being ignored by Rachel Reeves on a conference call, while their constituency’s farmers, freezing pensioners and independent school bursars were all told to take a number and wait behind the net zero review.

If Reeves didn’t listen to actual voters clutching their leaky boilers and land-based aspirations, she’s not suddenly going to leap into action over Jockey Club or Unibet profit margins.

Gambling is a target. It’s easy politics. Big, bad, greedy bookies. Whisper “responsible reform” and suddenly you’re the Marie Curie of Westminster. And racing? Racing has done bugger all to diversify its income streams beyond “more horses, more betting, more booze.” So now it finds itself like the unwanted uncle at Christmas — the one who used to be a laugh, but now everyone avoids because of a vague whiff of scandal and a few too many stories involving 16-year-olds in the '90s.

Yes, racing is now the Sir Uncle of Sport — accused of being culturally inappropriate, financially inconvenient, and politically toxic, while refusing to accept that the gravy train stopped at austerity junction years ago and the Millenials want nothing to do with it unless it involves a band that a baby boomer would never have heard of.

"Think of the jobs!" Yes, but also, think of the logic

To their credit, the BHA have produced figures. They say the tax could cause a £330 million hit and cost 2,752 jobs in year one alone. A scary number, yes. But it’s also the same argument the tobacco lobby used in the 90s: “Yes, it’s bad, but think of the economy!”

Jobs in racing are important, even though the industry relies on foreign labour — to towns, communities, and rural economies. But let’s not pretend this is an act of selfless public service. The industry exists to extract money from gamblers. When that’s threatened, suddenly everyone’s marching down Whitehall like it’s the Jarrow Crusade — except with more pastel trousers and Barbour jackets, looking like Farage on the campaign trail.

Final furlong: A national pastime built on moaning and money

Ultimately, this is less about jobs or tradition and more about power. Horseracing doesn’t want to be lumped in with the grubby world of online slots because it sees itself as better — more noble, more refined, more... horsey.

But in the end, it’s all the same business model: people parting with their cash for the promise of something exciting. Whether that’s a spinning reel or a sweaty gelding is just window dressing.

And let’s not pretend racing isn’t riddled with its own hypocrisies. It's long resisted regulation, ignored and thrived on bookmaker malpractise, shrugged at animal welfare scandals, and when asked what it would do if gambling revenues fell, offered the strategic equivalent of “we’ll think of something.” Well — it hasn’t.

So now it’s looking to Labour, of all parties, to save it from taxation — a Labour Party that barely managed to look up from its carbon budgets or PIP payments long enough to notice that half the country is boiling turnips for dinner.

If horseracing wants to be treated like a sacred British institution, maybe it should stop behaving like it’s on the same business plan as Corals or Paddy Power, ambivalent to the mistreatment of punters. No petition support from them for that.

Because right now, it’s not fighting for tradition — it’s fighting to keep the taxman out of the winner’s enclosure.