Labour needs to wake up to gambling’s complexities By Greg Wood, Talking Horses, The Guardian March 10, 2019 at 6:12 pm Tom Watson, the deputy leader of the Labour party and a politician with a long-standing interest in the regulation of gambling, offered some hints of what might be in a new Gambling Act if or when his party returns to power in a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research on Thursday morning. Watson was a prominent figure in the long-running and ultimately successful campaign to reduce the maximum stake on betting shop gaming machines (FOBTs) from £100 to £2. The machines’ presence on the high street was legitimised by Labour’s last Gambling Act in 2005 and it was frequently pointed out by those seeking to defend £100-a-spin roulette in Britain’s 9,000 betting shops that there are no limits to stakes when punters using gaming products online. But that, according to Watson, is likely to change under a future Labour government.
