"Tax, Tracks and Total Delusion"

Racing’s Great Hope — Wearing Glasses and Hurtling Towards the Guillotine

There are few figures in racing who can articulate policy, charm a Treasury wonk, and pronounce “redistributional parity” without sounding like they’ve just swallowed a thesaurus.
Tom Savill can. He does. Frequently. Dads Jacket

He’s intelligent. Measured. Decent.
And, strategically speaking, about as streetwise as a Labrador in a knife fight.

Because while Savill's intellect is busy composing elegant Levy reform plans and colour-coded tax tables, his political radar is still buffering somewhere on 3G. He thinks logic still counts in politics. That people read footnotes. That aligning with the sort of folk who think a fiver each-way is a moral failing will somehow lead to racing being spared when the great Gambling Purge comes.

That’s not strategy. That’s the fiscal equivalent of driving a Toyota Prius into a war zone and hoping the enemy respects your carbon offset.

The Man, the Myth, the Mild Disappointment

Tom Savill — heir to the Savill racing throne, Director of Plumpton, human embodiment of a lightly-oaked chardonnay — has become racing’s clean-cut frontman in a world of grey-haired syndicate chairmen, angry punters, and self-medicating administrators who can barely read their own terms of reference.

He walks into think tanks and DCMS briefings like a man who’s never been shouted at in a Ladbrokes, let alone paid £27 for a pint at Cheltenham and lost it to the wind and a sixth-placed nag from Sedgefield.

He exudes surface level competence.
And then he aligns himself with the policy ghouls who invented affordability checks, flog gambling-blocking apps, and genuinely believe racing is only marginally less harmful than North Korean arms trafficking.

This is like turning up to a Save the Pub campaign with temperance reformers, a kale smoothie, and your hand on the fuse box.

Strategic Thinking That Could Get You Killed in a Trolley Dash

Let’s be clear: Savill has bet the farm on the Social Market Foundation. Not metaphorically. Literally.

He contributed to their 2025 gambling tax paper — a document which proposes to:

• Jack up Remote Gaming Duty to 50%.

• Raise sports betting tax to 25%.

• “Protect” racing via a 5% GBD + 20% Levy split — which, if you squint hard enough, looks generous… until you realise that bookmakers will be under so much tax pressure, they’ll come after racing’s lunch money with a meat cleaver.

But here’s the genius of Savill’s strategy:
He believes bookmakers will absorb all this pain. Happily.
They’ll nod, pay up, and not pass the cost back via media rights, sponsorship cuts, or outright digital ghosting.

This is like mugging your local butcher and expecting him to sponsor your liver and bacon festival next month.

Savill’s betting on a better future, with zero leverage and a prayer, surrounded by people who think gambling is a public health emergency, and racing is its soft-focus gateway drug no more harmful than church bingo.

The Poltergeist, the Poker Convert, and a Pile of Bleeding Edge Delusion

He’s joined at the hip — policy-wise and photographically — with:

• James Noyes, architect of the affordability-check psychodrama.

• Derek Webb, a reformed gambler turned fiscal missionary who wants 60% tax rates and views punting as an economic cancer.

• Matt Zarb-Cousin, the human manifestation of a media poltergeist, now flogging Gamban, an app that blocks betting sites like a digital Jehovah’s Witness.

And there’s Savill, right in the middle of them — smiling, nodding, talking about “incentive realignment” like this is a collaborative art project and not a tactical policy mugging with racing hog-tied in the van.

Webb and Zarb-Cousin don’t want reform. They want obliteration.
They think betting is nicotine for the working class, and that horse racing is just roulette for the red trousers demographic.

They’re not here to help. They’re here to watch the sport collapse gracefully, and then write an op-ed in the Guardian explaining how Bingo and Barriers: Gambling-Free Britain by 2030 is the bold new future.

Lucy Powell and the Child-Poverty Steamroller

And if you thought that was bad, here comes Lucy Powell. Not with a solution, but with a moral tax guillotine in a red rosette. Powell has spotted the golden political goose:
Tax gambling, lift the two-child cap, and look like a saint.
No need for nuance. No need for sectoral detail. Just spin the roulette wheel of public opinion and collect votes on red.

Her team isn’t drawing fine lines between fixed-odds dopamine casinos and a National Hunt novice handicap.
They’re drawing headlines.

And when her fiscal boffins come looking for revenue, guess where they’ll stop first?
The sport standing closest to the gambling sector, smiling politely, and already co-signed onto tax reform documents with people calling for economic salvation by abstinence software.

That sport is racing. That bloke is Tom Savill.

Final Word: Politeness Will Not Save You in a Knife Fight

Tom Savill is one of the few people in racing who knows which way up a policy brief goes.
But he's acting like he can out-talk a fire, or negotiate with an axe.

He believes if he’s polite, rational, and diplomatically bald, the anti-gambling lobby will spare racing because it wears a hat and has good manners. They won’t.

They don’t care if your prize-money model is aligned with best-practice field-size metrics.
They care about headlines.
And they think you're selling poison in jodhpurs.

Savill's trying to run policy like it’s a well-bred maiden stakes — measured, technical, strategic.
But he’s in a bare-knuckle brawl with people who’d rather outlaw the entire sport than understand it.

And unless he wakes up, picks a side which is racing, and starts treating Webb, Zarb, and Powell like the political wrecking crew they are —
he’ll go down in history not as the man who saved racing...
but as the one who politely handed it over, along with Dads business, smiling, holding the knife by the blade.