The Bookies’ role is to relieve us of money

THERE has been some comment this week from that nice firm of bookmakers, William Hill, complaining that in 2009 there will be four blank racing Sundays. Such an oversight must be a body blow to Hills and all who sail in her. Their chief executive, one Ralph Topping, a man with whom I am not familiar and one that I suspect moves in slightly different social circles to myself, lodged the complaint. Judging by his photograph, he does not appear to be the sort of man who would be too perturbed if his gas boiler suddenly broke down.

But to get back to the central point. I am assuming that one of these Sundays might just be Easter Sunday, so that means only three normal Sundays are affected. Whatever one’s religious convictions, whilst we live in a Christian society, for those who need reminding, Easter is the day when it is claimed Christ rose from the dead. This is not something that is done every day [the current record is once every two thousand years] so it seems reasonable to commemorate such an occasion with some respect even if part of that does include a visit to B&Q.

The point is we have had to witness the tail wagging the dog on the fixture list for some time now. Bookmakers have elbowed their way into this domain on the premise that the more money they take, the more they can plough, seed and scatter back into racing. How laudable, how magnamaniuos of them to be so concerned over racing’s finances! Of course, bookmakers are no different from that fat man representing the bank on television, insurance companies or gas suppliers. Their only concern is to make money for themselves and their shareholders. When bookmakers were (unfairly in my opinion) taxed on turnover, they sold the BHB the lie that the greater turnover they could achieve the more they could return to racing. This did not make a scrap of economic sense. At the time, they were taxed on the amount of money taken through the tills. So it followed that the better the results for the punter, the more money could be ‘turned over’ because it was a case of cash being recycled or re-invested. Therefore, when results were good for punters, bookmakers had to take more money to make a smaller profit margin and then pay more tax on this inflated turnover. So, it was never in their interest to increase turnover, always to increase profit. At that time what suited them was less turnover and a higher rate of profit, which for a bookmakers means a couple of big-priced results in key races. Unfortunately the BHB bought the benevolent line and increased the fixture list in the belief that it would increase turnover resulting in more Levy.

Bookmakers have always liked lots of racing. Ideally they want to turn betting shops, or even your living room if you have Racing UK and ATR, into the equivalent of a casino where something is happening every few seconds, giving you no time to think. Punters leapfrogging from one race to another, hurriedly scribbling out or punching bets into computers, will invariably make ill-considered opinions. Result? Bookmaker wins!

Even now with a re-vamped and fairer tax system based on a bookmaker’s profit, that profit can still be increased if the amount of racing on offer reaches saturation point. Saturdays are a prime example. A minimum of six meetings means punters cannot even go to the bathroom! You will watch horses you meant to back win, and horses you didn’t mean to back but did, lose. Lovely! Just what Jolly Joe ordered!

The reason Mr Topping is miffed by any blank day of racing is that it not only spoils another potentially profitable day, but it breaks the established precedent.  It gives punters the chance to spend their time and money on something else. And guess what? There is the danger they may enjoy taking the kids to the zoo, the wife or girlfriend out to lunch or watching their local football team play more than sitting in a betting office watching cartoon horses and a seventeen-runner handicap (reduced to fifteen of course) from Carlisle. And that would never do – much better to keep Betting Office Charlie where he belongs!

Bookmakers have invested a great deal of money on being smarmy. They have a legion of smarmy representatives that live a high life going from racecourse to racecourse where they pretend to be ‘one of us’. They will claim they have just done their dough on the last favourite, when it is against company policy for them to bet at all and in any case, they are earning far too much to bother.

I have never understood the classic statement made by the card player who has lost heavily at the table and then states: ‘Surely you must give me the chance to win my money back!’ Well, actually, no. I thought the object at a card school was for man A to relieve man B of his money as quickly as possible, then get the hell out of there, and start spending it. The same, I am afraid, applies to bookmakers. I can’t blame them, they are in business after all. But we need to be aware of their motives. It is not their place to compress the fixture list and dupe the racing authorities into believing they are on racing’s side. They are purely there to relieve as many of us as possible with the money we possess, and that includes the newly formed racing authority, the BHA, that seems no more able to see through them than did the old BHB.