26 DECEMBER 1925, Page 16

A TAX ON BETTING [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]

SIR,—Will you allow me to offer a few comments on your article on the subject of a tax on betting ? You say that the

view of those who argue that the State should not recognize betting because it is sinful is deserving of no respect ; that Lord Newton, in his rollicking way, has smothered it with ridicule ; and that you will prove it to be mere prejudice. I fear I do not admire rollicking treatment of great moral issues, nor regard ridicule as the best way of answering those one differs from. So I will leave Lord Newton alone. But I cer- tainly cannot admit that you have proved that the State recognizes betting. Rather you seem to me to have proved that the State pursues, with meticulous precision, its policy of treating betting as it treats every other sin—namely, by ignoring it until it becomes a public nuisance. Drunkenness is a sin ; but before it can be made the basis of a charge in a police court it must be combined with disorder, with being on licensed premises, or in charge of a vehicle, &c. But a contract to make a person drunk, or to get drunk, would not be enforced in a court of law. It would be against public policy. Fornica- tion is a sin ; but it is not, either in man or in woman, an indictable offence. But a prostitute cannot sue for her earnings.

Betting is, I hold, a sin. But it is not an indictable offence unless it causes obstruction. The Post Office will supply telephones wherever and whenever they can be supplied at a profit. What is sent over the lines does not, the Post Office contends, concern it in any way. The Home Office sends police to keep order wherever people assemble. Betting is not interfered with upon a race-course because, in the opinion of the law, there is no obstruction, nor any annoyance to the public. If you say that all this is rank hypocrisy I shall agree with you. But you have most certainly not proved that the law now recognizes gambling. If it did I could sue for my winnings, and could not claim back losings. I cannot do the first, and I can do the second.

You are not right when you say that the idea that betting is a sin is the only motive behind the opposition to a tax. I oppose a tax for the following reasons :— (1) In no country where it has been tried has it reduced the volume of betting, but rather increased it.

(2) That a tax would do nothing to regularize or control betting, since in France, New South Wales, South Australia, New Zealand, and every other country where a totalisator alone is legal, and bookmaking prohibited, bookmakers exist and do as much, and more, business as of old. (3) That the psychological effect of a Government tax on gambling would inevitably be to produce in the minds of young people the impression that betting was a perfectly right and respectable thing. I have an immense mass of evidence on this point, too long to be summarized in a letter.

(4) That to license betting would be to produce a great vested interest most difficult to fight in the future.

(5) That the practical proposals put forward by the Home Office before the recent Commission were such as would fill every religious and social worker, with any first hand know- ledge of the conditions which exist in our great industrial centres, with despair.—I am, Sir, &e., PETER Gaur,:a (Canon of Manchester, Chaplain to H.M. the King).

St. Philip's Clergy House, 6 Encombe Place, Salford, Manchester.