The recent decision by the British media to portray all gifts to parliamentarians as scandalous, even when they are declared in the proper way, has been a boon to journalists. Up against a deadline and need a story? Simply look up the Register of Member’s Financial Interests and click on the name of any MP. Bridget Phillipson? Taylor Swift tickets from the Football Association. Peter Kyle? Madonna tickets from Sky TV. If the MP’s political stance can be loosely connected to the donor’s interests, so much the better. No one would be surprised that Kemi Badenoch is opposed to having a football regulator, but tell them that she once accepted free tickets from the Premier League and it becomes a story.

The implication is that money buys influence and it cannot be denied that having a word in a politician’s ear — or at least having them think well of you — must be the intention of those who make the donations. The latest of these scoops comes from The Times who today revealed that “Labour received gifts worth £1m from betting firms”. Regular readers of Britain’s newspaper of record know that The Times takes a dim view of betting firms and is therefore appalled that the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, accepted tickets from Entain to see England play Denmark in 2021 and the transport secretary, Louise Haigh, watched Barnsley play Sheffield Wednesday on the same company’s shilling. Wes Streeting even had a dinner paid for him by Allwyn, the company that currently runs the (state-owned) National Lottery! Pass the smelling salts.

Rachel Reeves has done particularly well out of the gambling industry, having received “£20,000 in donations from wealthy gambling bosses to fund her private office”, but this is all chicken feed compared to the cash donations to the Labour Party of one man:

In total, the Labour Party has accepted £1.08 million from those who made their money in the gambling sector. Most of this came from the little-known casino entrepreneur Derek Webb, who donated £750,000 this year and £300,000 in 2023.

Webb, a former international poker player and table game designer, has thrown his financial weight behind gambling reform efforts, including legal support for Gambling with Lives, which represents families bereaved by suicide, the successful campaign to curb fixed-odds betting terminals and Clean Up Gambling, a campaign group.

Webb is also the founder of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, Stop the FOBTs [fixed-odds betting terminals] and the Coalition to End Gambling Ads. He bankrolls the All Party Parliamentary Group on Gambling Related Harm and the “informal” pressure group Peers for Gambling Reform, as well as commissioning numerous reports from economic consultancy firms (one of which I discussed last month). I suspect that he will not be pleased to be grouped in with “betting firms” in The Times article (his company Prime Table Games is no longer operational and I understand that he is no longer actively involved in the sector), but it is nevertheless useful to know that most of the money swishing around in this policy comes from people who want more regulation, not less.

Why is someone who made his millions in the gambling industry spending so much money on “gambling reform efforts”? It is a peculiar story. Derek Webb invented three card poker, a popular casino game played around the world. In 2007, he noticed that the game was being used on fixed-odds betting terminals and that he wasn’t being paid any royalties. He considered legal action but, as he told the Guardian in 2013, “rather than sue I backed a campaign to make my point”. Over the next four years he spent £3 million on the campaign to make the machines commercially unviable through regulation and then told the Financial Times that he was thinking of campaigning against online gambling next. That is exactly what he did.

Webb seems to have a finger in every pie. Today’s report in The Times notes that:

Labour came under pressure at its conference to tighten regulation of the sector, with the centrist think tank the Social Market Foundation calling for gambling duty to be doubled.

The authors neglect to mention that the Social Market Foundation also receives donations from Derek Webb and it held an event at the Labour conference last month at which Derek Webb was on stage with the gambling minister Fiona Twycross. The panel discussion was chaired by James Noyes, an academic whom Webb has also supported — an entirely legitimate thing to do, but which done so the other way round politically would trigger a bout of vapouring

Mr Webb is free to spend his money as he pleases, of course, but given the hysteria over MPs accepting the occasional concert ticket, it seems strange that more attention has not been paid to the extraordinary largesse of a man who has pumped millions of pounds into the political ecosystem to lobby on a single issue. If The Times had not dubiously lumped him in with “betting firms” it seems unlikely the newspaper would have mentioned him at all. 

“We shouldn’t be accepting expensive gifts because it calls into question the independence of MPs and cabinet ministers,” said Iain Duncan Smith in response to The Times’ scoop. “The only way to show that is to get this [gambling reform] legislation through in double quick time, and to tighten it up, particularly around advertising.” That is one way of looking at it, but considering how much anti-gambling lobbyists are outspending the gambling industry, one could argue that the best way for politicians to show that money doesn’t buy influence would be for them to abolish all gambling regulation.