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.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.