A short trudge through the high roads tangled beneath the shadow of Wembley Stadium will transport you beyond the everyday of English football. Wherever you turn, you can bet on almost anything – from US major league baseball to the Portuguese presidential election to whether this Christmas will be white. There are 11 betting and gaming shops within a 20-minute walk of the ground. The London Borough of Brent – home of Wembley – has the capital’s highest concentration of gambling centres per person (if you exclude the less populous City of London and Westminster), at 82 bookies. It also has more than double the national average of problem gamblers. The beautiful game meets not-so-beautiful gaming here in this deprived sprawl of London’s far west.
Are these streets – and their counterparts around the country – about to change? Dramatically so, if we are to believe betting companies Betfred and William Hill, which have warned that thousands of stores will close if the government includes a gambling levy in the Budget. Rachel Reeves’ rumoured tax rises are expected to target slot machines and online gambling. Gordon Brown suggested the latter to me in an interview on the New Statesman Podcast a few months ago, as a way to pay for reducing child poverty. Treasury officials appear to have listened.
Backlash is building. Bets on horse racing, the most romanticised part of the industry, will reportedly be spared. This has neither stalled the Sun’s “Save Our Bets” campaign nor deterred Nigel Farage from a photo op playing the 2p machines on Clacton Pier – perhaps the only man in red trousers ever to do so. But like the coppers oxidising in his clammy palm, the facts around gambling in Britain are blurring in real time as Budget day looms
Bookmakers are already in decline: down from more than 9,000 in March 2014 to 5,931 in March last year. Betfred – the firm warning that all 1,287 of its shops will close – has admitted that 300 of those outlets run at a loss anyway. More poignantly, the vision of old boys thumbing the Racing Post and chatting about the horses over free cups of tea is a lost one. Now we see windowless crypts of blue light, wallpapered with screens above the hum of electronic slot machines once dubbed the “crack cocaine” of gambling. “Traditional bookies where people discuss racing were once common, but even the industry is aware that that kind of customer has largely died out,” says Rebecca Cassidy, an anthropologist who worked as a betting shop cashier in the early 2000s, when fixed-odds betting terminals first appeared.
Instead, the shops lingering on high streets today are gateways to an atomised world. Online casinos are now the more lucrative part of the betting giants’ business model, so the incentive is to lure punters on to those platforms. “What you have is cross-selling”, says James Noyes of the Social Market Foundation, a cross-party think tank. “If I’m a customer who wants to have a single bet on horse racing – relatively low in terms of harm and risk, and a very traditional part of British life – I’m constantly being induced not just to place that bet, but to migrate to online casino.”
If physical bookies close following an online tax rise, that will be a decision by betting companies to protect profits largely derived from online gambling. And with a fifth of players of online slots or casino games developing a gambling problem, we are looking at an industry (predominantly based offshore) that extracts wealth rather than enriches British life.
But tweaking tax is no simple fix. High streets are under harsher focus than ever. Their decline was once a retail story – the preserve of Mary Portas documentaries and Cameroon taskforce-ism. Now, as snatch theft, shoplifting and suspected fronts for money laundering frustrate locals, they have become the front line of a culture war. Bookies may run on the fumes of slot machines, but they are also warm places where lonely men congregate. They are easily cast as refuges of heritage under attack from a distant political class (Labour has been labelled the “pleasure police” waging a “war on fun” in the Sun’s pages). Those who campaign to tax and regulate betting are dismissed as snobs. “If it’s empty shop, empty shop, charity shop, vape shop, Turkish barber, and then a betting shop, an adult gaming centre – then yes, I do have a problem with that. And if that makes me an old-fashioned nostalgist, so be it,” says Noyes, a long-time advocate for gambling reform, who notes a coyness among politicians trying to make the same point.
But, peering through the windows of the bookies on my walkabout, I see this as a rare example of a culture war Labour could win. It is investing roughly £5bn in 339 “overlooked” neighbourhoods and giving councils new powers to block gambling licences – the same for “vape stores and fake barbers”, according to its Pride in Place strategy – a policy celebrated by the likes of Brent Council. There is a universe in which this government salvages the British high street. But it won’t tell that story, regretting every tax rise as a necessary evil rather than articulating the narrative Brown put to me back in May: “I would specifically say: ‘Gambling is causing a lot of trouble in poorer communities, and we’re dealing with it in this way so we can help children out of poverty.’ How much more would the public support that?” It’s a bet the Chancellor should be willing to place.
[Further reading: Prison sex stories are a sign of our corrupting state]
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What Keir won't hear