the petition against affordability checks. keep your fingers crossed.

​The risk to the survival of horse racing in this country cannot be over-stated. To save a soul, the Gambling Commission sees fit to sacrifice the heart.
100,000 people have now signed the petition against affordability checks and 11 Westminster bank benchers will shortly convene to consider whether the petition will be debated by parliament. Only 19 petitions have thus far been rejected for debate, making the odds on acceptance very much in racing’s favour. Yet 19 petitions have failed, even though the perception is that 100,000 signatures would make a debate a legal requirement. It would be of interest to know the topics of the petitions that failed to make it past the scrutiny of the good men and women of the selected eleven. 
Let me quote the late author Lawrence Gardner writing on a different subject altogether. ‘Above all such considerations there is the requirement to toe the party-line while paying homage to the demigods of power. This prerequisite has nothing to do with obeying the law or with behaving properly – it relies totally on not rocking the boat, and on withholding opinions that do not conform. Those who break ranks are declared heretics, meddlers and troublemakers, and as such are deemed socially unfit by their governing establishment.’
I suspect the eleven back-benchers do not convene with free-hands. I suspect they are ‘briefed’ as to the wants and desires of ministers and as such, not withstanding the encouragement of the Prime Minister’s statements on the matter, petitions only go before members of parliament if it is desired by ‘demigods of power’ who are unknown and not elected by the electorate of the country.
Is it a coincidence that Ireland, a country that embraces the horse racing and breeding industry with greater affection than the parliament of Britain, is also on a path to pull the carpet from under the sport by denying bookmakers the freedom to market their wares on National and satellite television before nine o’clock at night?
Can we trust a political system that over the past few years has removed centuries-old freedoms and human rights from the people who elected them and have many more restrictions on our liberty awaiting us further down the pipe-line? The minister may keep chanting ‘we want proportionate, frictionless checks’ before we proceed, yet there is no talk of reimbursing the sport for funds already lost by bookmakers implementing checks that are far from proportionate or frictionless’ under duress from the Gambling Commission.
Bookmakers are not blameless in all this. If they had taken gambling addiction more seriously a decade ago and implemented their own checks and balances, would we be so open to this assault on our liberty to bet to limits of our own choice? And if the sport’s governing bodies had made the bold move decades ago to finance the sport through similar funding avenues as all of our main competitors around the world and not stick with stupid loyalty to the ‘betting jungle’ of funding through commercial companies that always put their shareholders first, we would be in far stronger and independent position to stave off this threat to the future existence of our sport.
The racing and breeding industry employ many thousands of people and swells the exchequer by many millions of pounds annually. The sport is an asset to the country, so ask yourself this: why then should the government seek to put the sport in peril?
This government is, as are governments around the world, bound hand and foot to an agreement signed by Boris Johnson to take forward the concepts within the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’. Within the plans of Klaus Schwab and his cronies, there is no future for any sport that involves animals. Racecourses take-up land resources that would better serve the purposes of the ‘Great Reset’. Even having a cat or dog as a pet is seen by the planners of the ‘Great Reset’ as a waste of the Earth’s resources.
I have seen debates in parliament on topics that the government wish to drop a straight bat on. The debates are politely insipid and circuitous. ‘Jaw Jaw’ as Sir Winston said more favourably, a Prime Minister who would have fought tooth and claw for not only horse racing but for the independence of parliament to make its own decisions, rather than be lent on by outside influences like the W.H.O., the W.E.F. and the United Nations.
Quite recently several Just Stop Oil protestors were jailed from between 6-months and 2-years. The United Nations contacted the British government and criticised such sentences as ‘they would dissuade others from protesting’.
The petition must be kept open, with everyone in the industry urged to give their support. The aim must be to get 200,000 signatures. Not that I hold any more hope if 1-million signatures went before parliament. There is an agenda. It is not necessarily the agenda of the Prime Minister, and that is what is so concerning.