the gambling commission and the potential demise of the much needed smaller stable.

​I must admit to skipping the Racing Post’s main story in today’s edition. It was not because I do not appreciate the threat to the sport that the Gambling Commission represents but simply because, without a united, tactical counter-attack, to read what is threatened is depressing. I know, deep in the heart, that what is happening is orchestrated outside of Parliament and that if the sport had embraced a Tote Monopoly instead of walking hand-in-hand with the multi-national bookmaking industry, we might today be on the outside of this blitz on gambling and gambling addiction, as if the two are universally intertwined. If we had a system of gambling similar to our horse racing neighbours and competitors, we would be contributing more money to the Exchequer, enough to ring-fence us from the addictions of casinos, on-line bingo and poker sites and one-armed bandit machines, otherwise known as ‘slots’.
My hope for the future is this: in 5-years, hopefully sooner if Two-Tier and his socialist highway robbers are found guilty of more heinous crimes against the people who voted them into office, the political revolution (evolution?) about to sweep the U.S. and countries such as Italy, France and Germany, will happen here, with Reform becoming the political powerhouse of the country. Like him or misunderstand him, Farage will sweep away all this woke nonsense and put common-sense back on the political and social tables.
We must think short-term; we must plan for the future, and we must stop using the phrase ‘that ship has sailed’ whenever someone advocates a funding stream for racing resembling how France, Hong Kong, Japan or Australia, finance the racing programmes of their countries.

It may have caused controversy when Ireland introduced sixty-races restricted to trainers outside of the top four but I propose the B.H.A. look to a similar idea for this country as a way of helping and preserving the smaller stables who are, I suggest, the bedrock of our sport.
We have already lost, as good as, the permit trainer, the owner, trainer and usually breeder of two or three of the horses he trains himself or herself – the Waley-Cohens, for example, the Frank Coton’s of the past, owner-trainer of Grittar, and the sport cannot afford to allow the smaller yards to go the same way. The battle at the top of the sport between Nicholls, Skelton and Henderson, and the forays of Mullins and Elliott, may add intrigue, headlines and intensity to the sport, yet horse racing came into being and still exists as a country sport and places like Market Rasen, Taunton and Hereford are made more dynamic by the inclusion of the local smaller training establishments. 
The top always needs a bottom for stability, which is why I suggest sixty-races set aside for trainers with no more than thirty-five horses in training should be established simply to give a boost to the owners and staff of licenced trainers who give just as much in effort and dedication as the aforementioned superstar stables.
In today’s Racing Post, Sarah Bradstock is featured – Mr.Vango, her current stable star runs at Sandown on Saturday in race bearing ‘National’ in its title – bemoaning that she is down to just six horses in training and how in caring for her late husband, Mark, her owner-base slipped through her fingers. The Bradstocks, not only because Sarah is Lord Oaksey’s daughter, are the sort of people that bring more to National Hunt racing that they can ever expect to take from the sport. Remember Coneygree winning the Gold Cup and Carruthers the Hennessey; when Mark was alive, they proved they could do the job to the highest efficiency and no doubt Sarah and her offspring can continue the legacy if just one or two new owners offered their support. The sport needs the Bradstocks and others like them to prevent the sport morphing into a Premiership League that will render ‘all the surviving rest’ into non-league status.
Sixty-races, that might all it would take to give the smaller yards a better chance of survival until 2029, the year in which, at the latest, we can vote out the stupidity of woke and net-zero and vote in commonsense and a Britian comes-first political mentality.