Racing locked in game of chicken with bookmakers and one must blink first

It doesn’t matter how much money the big bookmakers spend trying to make their casino games look as innocent as the equally disingenuous National Lottery, they are still squirrels hoarding more than their fair share of acorns in the forest and stripping the bark off young trees.

They are also very accomplished at grooming politicians on both sides of the house. One only has to look at the register of members’ financial interests, which lists the hospitality benefits that they have received, to appreciate that they devote a lot more time and money to this worming than the British Horseracing Authority do.

And as the racing and gambling industries circle their wagons in the government’s run up – or should that be walk up – to the next government-led deal on how much money the bookmakers should return to the racing industry, the big bookmakers are mobilising all their usual ‘dark-arts’ weapons.

Sure, the gambling industry may justifiably feel that they are currently under attack. The affordability checks on punters are going to be some sort of Kafkaesque nightmare that we should have left behind in Brussels. And they are certain to drive punters to bet where there is less hassle and do little to help the genuine addicts.

It’s also totally outrageous that on-course bookmakers have had their bank accounts closed by woke, Stasi-styled executives. (That may read like an oxymoron, but the irony is that it isn’t.)

But all of that doesn’t give the big bookmaking companies a free pass to flex their weight against racing; and that is what is happening right now.

Bookmakers are very adroit at steering their customers where they want them. They principally use attractive money back offers and ‘best odds guarantee’ (BOG) deals.

At the moment a clique of the big bookmakers is giving racing in this country a warning whack by not offering BOG on a swathe of UK racing whist leaving the ability to offer BOG on foreign and Irish racing, on which they don’t have to pay the Levy back to English racing. Punters are surprisingly susceptible to such manipulation. It can, after all, make the difference between a winning and losing afternoon.

For this reason alone, it’s essential that the government changes the current Levy collecting system. Bookmakers should have to pay a Levy on betting on foreign racing if the point of consumption – where the bet is struck – is in this country.

The justification for this is pretty straightforward. The horseracing industry in this country creates the fans and the punters that the bookmakers profit from. It should not be undermined by foreign products that do nothing for the competitiveness of racing in this country and the employment it creates.

This bully-boy behaviour is, in effect, a game of chicken. Who will blink first, racing, by lowering its demands of the government, or the bookmakers, who risk losing market share? And that is a real risk. They will be aware that one of the mid-sized bookmakers in the UK increased its market share by 27 per cent last year by encouraging customers to bet on UK racing.

The government will also have to consider raising the Levy rate from 10 per cent to 11 per cent. Given that the rate used to be 10.75 per cent, this should be affordable for the bookmakers.

These are all issues that one would expect the terrestrial broadcaster of racing, ITV, to be covering. But they have a conflict of interest that is hiding in plain sight.

Ten years ago there was uproar in Australia when champion trainer Gai Waterhouse’s son Tom was considered to be inappropriately combining the role of pundit and bookmaker on TV. And he had to rapidly disappear from coverage. And yet a similar arrangement is now rife on ITV in this country, and no one seems to give a damn.

Ed Chamberlain promotes himself as a man of racing. And yet there he is on screen promoting gambling with one particular bookmaker in the same breath as he tells us he has the best interests of the sport at heart.

So where will he stand, given his remuneration from the bookmaker, when the thorny issues of the new Levy deal are debated on ITV?

Probably in the same place as those of some of his fellow presenters, who are also understood to be on the bookmakers’ payrolls.