Recently I was invited to be a guest on BBC Sunday Morning Live. Prompted by new NICE guidelines that suggest GPs should be used to spot problem gamblers, the debate was supposed to be centred on whether gambling should be considered a public health issue. Instead, it became a deeply concerning display of how eroded political debate has become.
NHS surveys, the only Accredited Official Statistics on the subject, have consistently put the rate of problem gambling at 0.3%-0.6%. Anti-gambling obsessives desperate to hype up the numbers habitually flaunt highly inflated surveys with questionable methodologies, even when the Gambling Commission, the Government’s regulator, has instructed them not to do so. Clearly, it is absurd to masquerade gambling as though it were a pandemic with such chronically low numbers.
When I reiterated this on the programme, the response from Will Prochaska, a professional public health fanatic, was to begin his usual routine of virtue-signalling pugnacity to supply an endless cocktail of misleading statistics. As I had predicted this display of spurious repertoire, I produced from my pocket a letter from the Gambling Commission, just one of many written to Prochaska, describing his use of statistics as “a mischaracterisation” and “not based on reliable data”. I read this out live on air.
My expectation was that the BBC host would question Prochaska over these very serious breaches of public trust and examine whether this undermined his wider case. Instead, she took the letter, and responded with a rather dismissive, “Okay, let’s say there are a million people in England who have an issue with their gambling.” Why? Why would we say that when the real figure is a fraction of that?
Later that day, I was invited onto Clare Foges’s LBC’s show. Halfway through her frankly hysterical interview, Foges cited Public Health England’s claim that there were 409 gambling suicides a year. I proceeded to inform her that the Gambling Commission had to write to the Select Committee after that statistic was used in evidence in Parliament, describing it as “unacceptable”.
Rather than acknowledge the correction, Foges caustically replied with “well, half the MPs are in the pocket of the gambling industry”, as though this somehow justifies fabricating the figures that ultimately decide how taxpayers’ money is spent.
What these episodes show is that the distortion of statistics isn’t trivial and accidental, it’s systemic and calculated, in a way that’s nearly impossible for sensible points of view to overcome.
Too many presenters seem to have an inherent cynicism towards anyone from an industry, organisation or company, underpinned by the belief that if you are pro-something you must have a vested interest in it, and if you are anti-something, you have nothing to lose if it all disappeared tomorrow. The burden of proof doesn’t rest or fall on the integrity of your evidence, but whether you are virtuous enough to be believed.
This is an extremely one-dimensional take. Just as socialism depends on people remaining poor, the public health bandwagon relies on people remaining state-dependent for its wheels to keep rolling.
This has profound consequences outside of the debate on public health. If free speech is ultimately a battle of ideas, for that speech to truly be free, both sides should begin on a level playing field. The nanny state zealots, however, in a post-pandemic world obsessed with what is good and bad for us, have ensured all debate remains firmly tilted in their direction, using emotional anecdotes they know carry weight to silence any countervailing force.
It’s clear that it’s unaffordable to treat the UK as though it were a population of patients, continually intervening on one issue after another in order to safeguard their ‘health’. Knowing this, campaigners work to find a statistic that fits their narrative the most, to present a particular issue as though it were a ticking timebomb – money and resources be damned. They have been blessed with a series of governments who are overwhelmingly pro-state: decades of politicians with no curiosity to explore solutions outside the state intervention orthodoxy.
For so long as speech has existed, some people have abused the trust of their listeners. For that threat of deception to be neutralised, it requires our media to be seekers of the truth and not lazy or complicit with one-sided accounts that misrepresent reality. If our journalists and presenters cannot fulfil this very basic task, we risk public discourse descending into simply which ‘fact’ is more emotionally compelling or feels more believable at the time than the others. That’s no way to run a country.
Abbie MacGregor is the Head of Communications at the Gamblers Consumer Forum.
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I think you have illustrated perfectly why people in their droves are turning away from the mainstream media.
It’s largely one-sided fear porn and takes no account of empirically derived fact, feels no obligation to justify itself, all the while accusing those it disagrees with of doing exactly the same thing.
Yep you can bet on that.
Unless, of course, that industry, organisation or company is, in some way, aligned with state ‘truth’ – then there is no cynicism to be found anywhere.
^This.
It would be interesting to test this assertion and see how many MPs do actually receive funding from the gambling industry (not just winning a couple of quid on the horses).
While we’re at it we could also assess how many MPs receive funding from ‘Green’ lobby groups.
I would wager a couple of quid that our MPs are more in the pocket of the greenies.
A tenner says you’re right on that one.
I just noticed the subtitle “Leading Britain’s Conversation”. Bit pretentious, what? Especially in the Era of X. I was thinking it stood for Left-wing Bollocks Cluster.
More than pretentious.
Clearly not a news organisation then.
”Safeguarding”
There is a repulsive, extremely modern word, the epitome of the nanny state. Overbearing and sanctimonious.
It puts everyone into 3 categories. Victim, predator and protector.
If you don’t play along and give into everything the protectors demand, then you are a bad, reckless person and basically on the side of the predators.
Not too far off topic: RIS = reconfigurable intelligent surfaces
Spying on you and you haven’t even got a mobile phone! This shit sees through walls,no kidding!
Got a router? Tick, your on!
Microwave surveillance
Radio 1 Piedophile DJ dies after falling into river!
Oh dear, how sad, never mind!
His love of pies probably contributed his death, weighed him down perhaps.
Fat floats on water.
I am always amazed when I see talk shows on different screens in the gym at how many influencers and opinion types there are. Add the bias suggested here and it would be a surprise if it were not more abused!
Wouldn’t it be refreshing if the gov’t announced the nhs GPs would now be looking at all the adverse events and deaths post covid vaxx? And perhaps offer help.
Maybe asking about the huge level of excess deaths from 2020 onwards when normal pandemic observation would say that there should be less deaths than expected as the weakest have been culled early. This pattern is seen in countries with jab levels of no more than 30% and I presume no ongoing stabby programme. That in the US a report can look at the huge increase in 25-45 deaths – you know, the prime of life – and not go near ischaemic causes is amazing.
In my experience, and I have had a lot of interaction with journalists over the years, there are a slack handful of journalists who are focused on reporting the facts and then discussing that information in a balanced manner, warts n’all. The remainder tend to the lazy and venal, frequently driven by ulterior motives and an all consuming agenda. Anyone who disagrees with their position is an enemy who must be undermined and shut down with urgency.Their ‘facts’ and ‘truths’ trump everything else. Rationality is the prime casualty. Debate is DOA. Journalism contains an awful lot of cess – time we emptied the pit.
From the NICE guidelines:
Consider asking people about gambling (even if they have no obvious risk factors for gambling-related harm) when asking them about smoking, alcohol consumption or use of other substances (for example, as part of a holistic assessment or health check, when registering for a service such as with a GP or in contacts with social services).
The moment it’s accepted that, instead of treating demonstrably existing health problems in ways proven to be clinically effective, the job of a health service is to induce behaviour change to prevent health problems based on empirically unexplained statistical correlations, the number of such behaviours will be keep growing because there’s no amount of behaviours in other people natural busybodies wouldn’t object to and no limit to statistical correlations which can be fabricated intentionally or occur by accident to enable someone to ‘prove’ that his pre-existing theories had been right all the time.
The prominent example for this is Jeremy Clarkson. He was hospitalized because of pneumonia during a holiday in Spain about two years ago. During this stay in hospital, he was (most likely) talked into giving up smoking to improve his health. It improved so much that his life had to be rescued by an emergency ateriosclerosis operation about a year later. A scientist would now conclude that the theory that smoking causes ateriosclerosis has been disproven. A lobbyist who doesn’t give a f***k about how many people end up dying spuriously¹ because of medical misinformation spread for political purpose will start to talk and wave his hands energetically.
¹ An otherwise healthy acquaintance of my mother suddenly dropped dead during a walk about two weaks ago. I can’t help wondering if his life could also have been saved by such an operation had his doctors bothered to look for early symptoms despite he wasn’t a smoker and/or if he had been a celebrity, too.
i was given some good advice over 30 years ago. “If you torture data long enough it will confess to anything”. We have to be very careful with data – it’s just snapshots of reality.