Stop Feeding the Parasite: Why Backing Bookies Won’t Save Racing

There is a perverse romanticism clinging to British racing—a desperate belief, passed down like a hereditary neurosis, that if punters just keep turning up, just keep betting with the big firms, just keep swallowing every margin-slashing, account-limiting insult with a smile and a lucky 15, then maybe, just maybe, they’ll save the sport.

They won’t.

Because the hard truth is this: punters cannot save racing through supporting the very bookmakers who are killing it. You can’t douse a fire with petrol just because it used to be called paraffin in the good old days. The current model isn’t broken. It’s functionally parasitic. And punters who keep feeding it in the name of tradition, loyalty, or misplaced nostalgia are simply prolonging the agony.

Harmonising Taxes, Atomising the Sport

The latest indignity comes courtesy of the Treasury, whose proposal to “harmonise” betting taxes sounds harmless enough—until you realise it’s the fiscal equivalent of painting over dry rot. At present, betting on racing is taxed at 15% of bookmakers’ gross profits, while online casinos and slot machines are hit at 21%. The plan? Bring them into alignment.

The likely result? Racing gets lumped in with the digital opium dens of online gaming, punters face fewer incentives, operators cross-sell them into oblivion, and another £40–£90 million a year quietly vanishes from the sport’s economic bloodstream. But don’t worry, say the BHA—this will be a “challenge.” That’s regulator-speak for we’re completely buggered but don’t want to cause alarm until after the drinks reception.

Bookmakers: The Husband That Keeps Hitting You

It gets worse. Not only can punters no longer win, they’re expected to keep smiling while being fleeced. Because the reality is that bookmakers have made every move possible to eliminate winning customers. Restrictions, account closures, manipulated SPs, vanishing boosts, and affordability checks so invasive they may as well ask for your blood type and Netflix viewing history. The whole setup is engineered to ensure that you, dear punter, are a liability the moment you display competence.

And yet, most of racing’s loyal backers, battered and belittled, keep coming back. Racing bettors now resemble the abused spouse who still sets the table for dinner, even as the plates keep flying past their head. Because this is “our game,” and we love it, and what choice do we have? Well here’s one: walk away. Not from racing, but from propping up the very businesses bleeding it dry.

Supporting racing by betting with today’s corporate bookmakers is like supporting your local pub by drinking in Wetherspoons and hoping the landlady down the road will somehow benefit via osmosis.

The BHA: In Bed With the Butcher, Not the Baker

Let’s be clear: the sport isn’t just under siege from government mismanagement—it’s being sabotaged from within. The BHA, now performing its best impersonation of a moral compass in a tumble dryer, is clutching its pearls over tax changes while remaining suspiciously silent on the decades of structural rot it has overseen.

Remember affordability checks? Those were waved through and welcomed via a White Paper with minimal resistance. Remember the profit-sharing model? A system where racing only thrives if bookmakers clean out their customers—approved without a second thought. Owners get crumbs, punters get contempt, and the BHA gets… another panel to sit on. The regulator is too close to the bookmakers and increasingly managed by racecourses, who themselves are little more than event venues chasing volume over value.

It’s no wonder the fixture list looks like a spreadsheet generated by a blindfolded goat: seven meetings a day, most of them Class 6 dross, designed not for sporting integrity but to keep the machines fed and the profits flowing.

Punters Are the Host, Not the Parasite

Let’s kill the myth that punters are the problem. Punters are the host organism in this entire setup. Without them, there is no sport. But that host has been drained to the point of collapse. The solution isn’t to keep feeding the parasite. It’s to remove it. Racing must disentangle itself from the bookmaker-industrial complex that rewards mediocrity, punishes insight, and slaps a risk warning on any horse that wins more than once a month.

The industry wails about black-market betting, but it’s not the black market that’s driving punters away—it’s the licensed ones. It’s not unregulated gambling that’s killing racing—it’s over-regulated punters and under-regulated operators. The operators the BET365s, the William Hills etc that use and abuse their customers and have a history that the media outlets and the BHA refuse to condemn.

Time for a Breakaway: Tote, Exchange, and a Total Reset

So what’s to be done? The same thing that’s been obvious for a decade but no one in power has the guts to implement: build a national Tote and exchange, controlled by racing and for racing, that finally gives punters an honest market and the sport a sustainable funding model. No margin manipulation. No account closures. No parasitic intermediaries. Just pure, transparent liquidity and a structure that rewards participation, not exploitation.

It’s not radical. It’s overdue.

Less Racing, More Value. Fewer Crumbs, More Control.

If we’re serious about saving the sport, cut the number of fixtures, if tax does that, it may be a blessing. Cull the crap. Stop offering up 0–60 handicaps like they’re sporting events and not just digital wallpaper for betting apps. This is the racecourses and bookies creating race fodder to profiteer from. Raise prize money at the top. Invest in stories, not quantity. Give punters something worth staying for.

And if you’re a punter? Stop thinking that loyalty to the sport means loyalty to bookmakers. It doesn’t. It never did. That illusion has been used against you for years. You don’t owe your custom to a firm that would happily algorithm you into oblivion if it meant another half-percent on the EBITDA. That includes the Horserace Bettors Forum, you complain about the poor terms and offering for punters then support measures that protect bookmakers profits.

The Bottom Line

The punter cannot save racing by funding the problem. If the sport is going to have a future—one that respects players, values quality over quantity, and doesn’t rely on predatory profit structures—it needs a total reboot, not another sticking plaster on a carcass.

Bookmakers won’t reform. The regulator won’t lead. The BHA won’t resist. But punters? Punters can finally stop enabling.

Stop betting with the problem. Start demanding the solution. Or we’ll all be left reminiscing over a sport that once had pedigree, before it got gelded by greed.