affordability checks: tragedy or opportunity?

​This piece will be all over the place and a little disjointed – what’s new, I can hear you say – as I am attempting to link two pressing topics of conversation that between them possess the capacity to take the sport down the road of destruction.
This week in the Racing Post it has been wall-to-wall articles on the imposition of affordability checks on punters. Let me be clear; this subject is the greatest threat to the survival of horse racing since the dawn of the sport and I am in no way criticising the Racing Post for giving it almost blanket coverage on its front pages. I just happen to believe that hereby lies the opportunity to think outside of the box, to start a conversation amongst administrators and racing enthusiasts to locate alternative ways to fund the sport. Let’s not make arrangements for our destruction before we have considered every option available to us to circumvent the Gambling Commission or the Government’s dastardly plan to kill off our sport.
Affordability checks are an assault on our God-given liberty to think and act as we please, within the law of the land, obviously. Gambling addiction is not, though, to be taken lightly. It is vice that can destroy not only the life of the addict but his or her nearest and dearest. But so can addiction to alcohol and no affordability checks are imposed on drinkers when they purchase booze in pubs, supermarkets or off-licences, if the latter establishments still exist. Drink is drink, whether its vodka, scotch or lager. Taken to excess, alcohol changes personalities and inhibitions and can lead to anger, mood-swings and anti-social behaviour and worse. Betting and gambling, though, are two completely different species and the B.H.A. should inform the Gambling Commission of this, apparently, little known fact.
Look-up the definition of betting in a dictionary and the word gambling does not appear. Bet/betting: to stake an amount of money as a bet. To make a bet with someone. Gambling: to venture or hazard something. To play a game of chance for money or property. Now, I am playing, to an extent, fast and loose with definitions as a bet is a risk in the same way as a gamble might be. But to me, a gamble is more associated with the risk of losing big or losing something as great as a marriage, reputation or a business. ‘He knew he was gambling away his marriage’. Not, he was betting away his marriage’. 
Though affordability checks are not in my domain as I have not had a betting account and would never risk gambling away the contents of a bank account, I will enter a betting shop to bet a few quid on occasion. I consider myself a bettor, not a gambler. If I placed a £1,000 on a horse I would be gambling. If a multi-millionaire placed a £1,000 on a horse he or she is betting a sum of money he or she can afford to lose. If J.P. McManus, for example, walked into a betting shop would he be asked to prove he could afford a four-figure bet? 
Affordability checks are morally wrong and its about time someone challenged their legitimacy in a court of law. Affordability checks are a gross infringement on our civil liberties. The origin for them can be traced to the introduction of slot machines in betting shops. Instead of arguing the acceptable stake for a machine, the betting industry should simply get rid of them, even if all they will be doing in transferring the problem elsewhere.
And here is a controversial point-of-view: this humungous problem is racing’s fault through its reliance on funding the sport through the revenue from the levy, betting shops and its total reluctance to even consider investing in its own tote, a system that has allowed countries long-thought our racing inferiors to overtake us to the point where we are but a dot in the distance. Let the sport die rather than do away with the betting jungle on racecourses!
We may have to accept that our sport is too top heavy, with too many commercial fingers in the pie, that the elastic has reached breaking point. Yes, the race-program, for now, must be reduced so that it reflects the reduced number of horses in training, as well as owners, trainers and staff. But this is the time, perhaps as the sport teeters at the precipice, for some old-fashioned blue-sky thinking, to reconsider the impossible and drag that ship back into harbour. Of course, the sport needs and deserves vibrant governance rather than the insipid leadership that is the hallmark of the B.H.A. 
The profits from betting on horse racing should go 100% to the sport. That is the golden solution. In the mean-time, the problem of gambling addiction should be dealt with in-house, with, somehow, a register of addicts, somewhat akin to a sex register, so that the sport can fund addiction therapy for those who have succumbed. But the sport cannot even think of such a scheme at the moment as it does not have the funds to extend a caring hand.
Affordability checks are an attack on our freedom. Ask a politician to tell us how much he or she earns outside of their parliamentary salary and we will be told that it is a private matter. Yet those same politicians are imposing bettors be asked the same question and for the liberty of placing a bet the shop manager must know what his life savings accrue to and what his or her monthly salary is. It is scandalous; and perhaps more concerning, is that it might just be the start of something far worse. The World Economic Forum do not like independent businesses. Nor do they like free-thought. They like control; track and trace, new normal, ‘own nothing and be happy’. That’s the future; how can betting shops and sport fit snugly within that agenda?