FOOTBALL POOLS AND THE MACHINE AGE
[To the Editor of TUE SPECTATOR.] Sin,—As one of your working-class readers who has read the articles and letters about football pools, may I, who am indifferent both to • football and betting, nevertheless Say hoW immense is the working man's anger and contempt for those mainly religious minority bodies who seek to deprive him of yet another pleasure : that of football pools ? The
widespread resentment felt equals that of a year ago when the Government, bowing to working-class opposition, were forced to withdraw the unemployment assistance scales.
The working man's life today is being made unbearable by increasing regulations and verboten, introduced not because he wants them but because the Churches want them and shout loud enough until they get them. It is being increasingly pointed out that religious objection to yet another alniost exclusively working-class amusement on the grounds of its " exploitation " (the Churches, significantly enough, having now to use Communist phraseology) comes with especially bad grace from Churches who condone the grossest forms of exploitation, social evils such as the Means Test and the brutal exploitation of young people in the distributive trades. Nor is it lost upon the working man that while a religious deputation tries to induce a Cabinet Minister to suppress football pools, no similar religious deputation even dreams of asking him to suppress the gambling and speculation pools in that glorified Casino known as the Stock Exchange.
The undue power exercised by the minority religious bodies of Britain is growing dangerous. Britain is not a Christian country. The Churches admit that. The ethical code is not Christian. They know that too. As long as he injures nobody else, the working man feels that he can act as he likes and spend his own money as he likes. That is Why he bitterly detests the social dictatorship of this country by a minority of wet-blanket parsons and Sabbatarians who against the desires of the vast majority, repeatedly influence legislation, and have brought affairs to such a state that in " free," " democratic " -Britain there is far less social freedom for the worker than there is in undemocratic" countries. This can be shovrn time and time again. One can only suggest that politicians are scared of offending the parsons. It is time somebody stood up to them and started giving us back a feW more liberties : a secular Sunday and conditions for an enjoyable social life.
- The religious and economic arguments against football ,pools do not, of course,. stand examination. They can be applied to everything and cannot stop dead at football pools. Money not spent on the pools would not go' into a savings bank but more likely to a bookie. There are no cases of families being ruined by spending sixpence a week on football pools but there are thousands of cases of families being ruined in health and mind by chronic unemployment or under- employment. It is surely more against this that the Churches should turn their guns.
But completely out of touch with working-class life and believing gambling to be itself evil, the Churches ignore or are ignorant of the fact that the great increase of the gamb- ling they so much deplore is, like speed record-breaking, mass spectacle and alcohol drinking, the natural reaction of man against the machine as at present owned and operated. Chance has been almost completely eliminated from our modern super-regulated and time-clocked industrial life. The hope, the chance of a poor man rising from the bottom to the top of the industrial ladder has gone in this age of • 'vast millionaire monopolies. Chance, as we master our environ- ment, is being eliminated from nearly every walk of life. -
The only important: sphere.; left whgre; •cha,nce-: prevails is gambling. Its clement of chance .(arid. in. the case of football pools, skill) together with the hope of fortune and with it escape from a mechanised life, adds 'res.( and .4atisfaCtion to a monotonous, mechaniSed, moot-Iffce existence; I can vouch for this as I have worked in Modern. factories---only I found my ways of escape in other direOtiiiiii-; I haVe'fieiird many working men say that btit for 'foOtbafl
would be little left to live for
Surely, therefore, it is or should be the duty of all iFelkgious bodies who regard man as an end in hiinself and :not as a means to a profit-making end, to agitate not against kmphli,ag and other reactions from the machine but to agitate, Tor a new Socio-economic system from which such degrading' exPkiitiet inn and dehumanisation of men will have been elimi.nated R-11.(1 with it perhaps the need for such vicarious but at present Psychically beneficial amusements as football
pogl .-
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