Mailwatch(ed) Forum

davidjay wrote: ↑Sat Apr 18, 2026 7:24 pm If you were worried about gambling you'd ban football. i would imagine more is bet in a weekend, perhaps even on one fixture, than in a year of greyhounds.

Ironically Wimbledon AFC I believe built there new ground on some of the dog track.

Youngian wrote: ↑Sat Apr 18, 2026 8:11 pm
The argument Zarb-Cousins is advancing is that the gambling lobby is an extremely lucrative one able to excert weighty pressure on legislators. To continue an activity opponents regard as cruel to animals.

Does that argument stand up? There will be a relatively small number of people who gamble only or mainly on dogs in England, but It's nowhere in terms of the big gambling sports. As David says, the social harm is going to overwhelmingly from the bigger sports (especially football and racing), and problem gamblers won't gamble any less because they can't bet on the 1.03 at Sittingbourne any more.

I don't really see any reason to doubt the official line- dog racing is a reasonably sized industry in England (and Ireland too, where it's not banned) and it would lose them votes if it was banned.

And gambling just got a hefty tax rise in the Budget. In my view, it should have had that in the first budget, but that's not a particularly powerful lobby. cf the lobby that makes it impossible to build anything like the homes we need for the fast growing population (some of the same lobby being very liberal on immigration numbers).

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Sat Apr 18, 2026 8:00 pm Yeah, the article cunningly elides animal welfare and gambling. Football and horse racing are miles ahead of the rest. Greyhound racing is behind golf.

I have absolutely no idea what that means. For which I am eternally thankful.

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Sat Apr 18, 2026 4:52 pm Ah, the old "I'd support those houses if they were council houses" approach. Not those solar panels there. In fairness, all parties tend to be nimby when it's something big near them, but they're not posing as the only people who get climate change.

In other news, Zack's comic does another "Isn't Hannah Spencer lovely and cool?"

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... hounds-ban

Green MP: Labour caricatures working-class people over greyhound racing
Hannah Spencer says minister ‘continuously offends people by saying working-class people don’t care about dogs’

I couldn't care less if greyhound racing is banned. I think it probably will be in the not too distant future. But I'm struggling to find a quote of Labour "saying working class people don't care about dogs". I've certainly seen people speculate that Labour think it would lose them votes to ban it, but that's not the same thing. Quotes in the article from Nandy point out, quite accurately, that it's a popular sport, and big industry. Governments don't tend to rush to ban these things.

Just in case you don't think Labour are the baddies here, the article points out.

Labour has close ties to the gambling industry, taking hundreds of thousands of pound in donations during the general election campaign. Senior figures have been invited to glitzy events held by betting lobbyists.

Alas no space to point out that the Budget raised an extra billion of tax off gambling.

I like that she rehomed greyhounds, but she's already shown herself to be a self-righteous bullshitter, who as far as I know hasn't engaged with people who pointed out that subsidizing high energy users in a rich country will mean people in poor countries can't even cook.

And look who else has shown up? I admire his gambling work, but he's not an academic expert or anything, and he hates Labour because they chucked Jez out.

Matt Zarb-Cousin, a co-founder of Gamban, an app that helps people with gambling addictions, said: “The gambling lobby in Westminster has had successive governments believing they somehow speak for the working class while their sector exploits and extracts from it. To make the assumption ordinary working people somehow don’t care about the welfare of dogs is a form of class prejudice.

Again, why do you have to be "class-prejudiced" because you won't ban a popular sport? This stuff is such guff.

We might reasonably ask, what's Hannah Spencer's policy on gambling? She wouldn't accept gambling hospitality (not that it did all that much good for the providers in terms of Labour raising extra tax), but what would she actually do?

My own MP wasn't very complimentary about her.

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Sun Apr 19, 2026 10:57 am

Youngian wrote: ↑Sat Apr 18, 2026 8:11 pm
The argument Zarb-Cousins is advancing is that the gambling lobby is an extremely lucrative one able to excert weighty pressure on legislators. To continue an activity opponents regard as cruel to animals.

Does that argument stand up? There will be a relatively small number of people who gamble only or mainly on dogs in England, but It's nowhere in terms of the big gambling sports.

Perhaps Mark likes these lovely dogs

Tony Greenstein has been suspended by the Green Party. Reasons for his suspension are his terror charges and the fact that he's a notorious antisemite.

Sources in the Green Party telling us he will be expelled. Greenstein's letter protesting suspension is below

Youngian wrote: ↑Sun Apr 19, 2026 5:15 pm
Perhaps Mark likes these lovely dogs

Right, but you don't have to suppose gambling interests stop the Government from banning greyhound racing or anything. It's a fairly popular sport, though clearly much less than it was. Gambling interests could replace that income reasonably easily.

Oboogie wrote: ↑Sun Apr 19, 2026 5:26 pm Tony Greenstein has been suspended by the Green Party. Reasons for his suspension are his terror charges and the fact that he's a notorious antisemite.

Sources in the Green Party telling us he will be expelled. Greenstein's letter protesting suspension is below

Unfortunately, the Greens aren't learning fast enough. And it goes all the way to the Deputy Leader.

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Sat Apr 18, 2026 5:04 pm And Scotland, but there were no tracks there, and only 1 in Wales. There are 20 in England, which may explain why it hasn't followed Scotland and Wales.

There's one in NI @ Drumbo, just outside of Lisburn. Been there once - it "groundshares" with Lisburn Distillery F.C. with the soccer pitch in the middle of the track. At one end is the stand & clubhouse of the football club, while at the other is the stand & facilities of the greyhound end. Both can't be open at the same time apparently!

There's still a few greyhound tracks in the Republic, and they are partly funded by grants from the government.

From the info above, I can't see greyhound racing being banned either side of the border in the short to mid term.

It does feel like greyhound racing will just fade away, even without legislation to ban it. Gamblers are looking elsewhere and the sport alone can't keep stadiums going. Swindon's Abbey Stadium often attracted more anti-cruelty protestors than punters. Most seem dependent on their local speedway team doing well, as that is a very common sharing arrangement.

Swindon's dog/speedway stadium is currently abandoned. The stadium, and that lovely land with potential for 130 homes that are about ten minutes from the M4, is currently owned by the same company that owned Milton Keynes, Poole, Reading and Eastville speedway stadiums. That company vowed to keep speedway in all of those towns too. Restoring it in its currently location will also be problematic as they have built new homes on the car park. I can imagine the home owners will be delighted at the additional traffic, let alone the Tannoy announcements and motorcycle revving on race nights.

soulboy wrote: ↑Mon Apr 20, 2026 9:33 am Most seem dependent on their local speedway team doing well, as that is a very common sharing arrangement.

Same at Peterborough. The Peterborough Panthers no longer exist as they've now closed the East of England showground too.

If you've got a lot of land just about breaking even if you're lucky and a property developer looking at it, I wonder what you're going to do?

Assume Speedway is dying of death as well. Used to be shown on Sky but I haven’t seen it for years.

Speedway and Greyhound Racing both took off about the same time in the UK, the 1920s. I suppose you'd not expect Speedway to be much older than that, but I was surprised how recent Greyhound Racing was.

I can remember Speedway being big in the 80s, a seemingly permanent presence on Midlands Today. So much did they talk it up that I got the impression that Cradley Heath must be a big place. It isn't. But Midlands Today always made the bits of the Midlands near Birmingham sound like it was big and important, while barely making it down to Cheltenham and Gloucester, which are bigger than West Bromwich.

Cradley Heath: where BSR record changers came from.

Not just a Midland thing, the speedway fortunes of the Mildenhall Fen Tigers and Ipswich Witches often made the regional news.
Ice Hockey had a following after WW2 and remember its popularity lingering in Peterborough and Nottingham in the 80s.

Ice Hockey is a very big thing in Nottingham, these days

Zack Polanski plots review to junk Greens’ unpopular policies

https://www.politico.eu/article/boss-br ... -policies/

And well he should. Policy making to be streamlined. It's virtually impossible to set even a remotely credible budget without having a small group who can hack through everything and do more than make up numbers on a spreadsheet that balance.

I think this is a positive development. I keep laughing at Zack but I can't say he's got it wrong, given his polling, can I? He might have much better instincts than I or anyone else has. I reckon that he'll get a decent amount of leeway to trim things.

Youngian wrote: ↑Wed Apr 22, 2026 5:10 pm Not just a Midland thing, the speedway fortunes of the Mildenhall Fen Tigers and Ipswich Witches often made the regional news.
Ice Hockey had a following after WW2 and remember its popularity lingering in Peterborough and Nottingham in the 80s.

I like to think of myself as fairly knowledgeable on towns and sports, but I'd barely heard of Mildenhall, and had no idea it had a Speedway team at any point.

I find it quite touching the way minor sports took hold in otherwise unremarkable towns. Not just Speedway, but Basketball back in the day had top teams from Bracknell, Worthing and Hemel Hempstead.

Talking of Cradley Heath, I finally made it there on a train from Birmingham Snow Hill to Worcester. The route was a veritable feast of places I recalled from Midlands Today: Smethwick, Rowley Regis, Stourbridge... None were as big as they sounded on the news.