Gambling, Deprivation and Class: Reflections from a UK Case Study
Gambling, Deprivation and Class: Reflections from a UK Case Study
Emma Casey
In 2013 the British Conservative Member of
Parliament John Redwood, denounced gambling as an unappealing affliction of the
idle, feckless and work-shy poor remarking that:
Poor people believe there’s one shot
to get rich. They put getting rich down to luck and think they can take a
gamble. They also have time on their hands. My voters are too busy working hard
to earn a reasonable income.
Redwood’s remarks tap into a long history of social
attitudes towards gambling among lower income and working-class people where
critiques of gambling are often tied to wider judgements of the everyday
spending and consumption practices of working-class and lower income people. In
1923 the British Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald
described gambling as a
‘disease which spreads downwards to the industrious poor from the idle rich’,
and famously, the Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher was reluctant to endorse a UK National Lottery under her leadership. Gambling, after
all, was counter to Thatcher’s Methodist principles of thrift and
industriousness and also to the ideals of aspiration and entrepreneurship that
became pillars of her ideological political stance. Commentators across the
political spectrum have condemned the exploitation of the poor perceived to be
intrinsic to the popular appeal of gambling. Following the contentious launch
of the UK National Lottery in 1994, the social realist playwright Alan
Bleasdale described National Lottery players as ‘sad, lonely and desperate’.
Recent research findings in the UK and beyond
have demonstrated a clear link between gambling and income inequalities,
showing that those on lower incomes are more likely to be ‘problem’ or ‘at
risk’ gamblers than higher income groups, spending a higher percentage of their
income when they gamble (Orford et al., 2010; Freund and Morris, 2006). Tu et
al. (2014) found a direct
correlation between socio-economic deprivation and gambling related harms in
advanced capitalist economies. Similarly, Walker et al. (2012)
found that gambling-related harm is statistically more likely for those
experiencing social deprivation. The
British journalist Helen Pidd recently described gambling as ‘an industry
that feasts on the poor and vulnerable’ (2017), while Tom Watson, erstwhile
Deputy Leader of the UK Labour Party, used part of his 2017 conference speech to make direct links between gambling
and poverty. Arguing that ‘some gambling firms, driven by greed, are
deliberately targeting our poorest communities’, Watson’s speech echoed wider
concerns emerging in current gambling research that individual decisions around
gambling are always bound to social inequalities, context and structure. Other research has
reinforced the notion of gambling, particularly on lotteries as a ‘voluntary
tax’ that is disproportionately funded by lower income gamblers. Worthington
(2001) for example, notes the ‘economic burden or incidence’ of implicit
gambling taxes, while other research notes that lower income groups contribute
more to state revenue via lottery sales than higher income groups (Beckert and
Lutter, 2013). Thus, many commentators have described gambling and state-run
lotteries as a ‘tax on the poor’ (Volberg and Wray, 2007) with the British
sociologist Gerda Reith describing the UK National Lottery as a ‘particularly
regressive form of taxation, with those on the lowest incomes paying far more
than their wealthier neighbours’ (1999, p. 102).
Throughout my academic career, I have sought
answers to the broad question; ‘why do people choose to spend their scarce
resources on gambling games when they receive so little in return?’. In
answering this question, my research has explored the meanings and experiences
of gambling as it is situated within wider social, economic and cultural
contexts, moving away from a sole focus on individual responsibility. In other
words, I look to address the emphasis in gambling research that has tended to
focus on the gambler as pathological, deviant and other by offering a deeper
focus on the ordinary, everyday, ‘taken-for-granted’ forms of gambling that are
often overlooked in gambling research. The social theorist Patricia Hill
Collins calls this the difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ (1997). By
complementing existing accounts that have recorded the practices and processes
of gambling with rich, qualitative detail of the meanings and experiences of
gambling, exploring for example, how gambling experience might be connected to
feelings, emotions, personal biographies and experiences of class, race and
gender, we can offer new insights into what motivates people to gamble.
In order to develop accounts of the subjective
meanings underpinning gambling practices and processes, I collaborated with the
British Mass Observation Archive to establish a major new Directive entitled Gambling
and Households that was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
Mass Observation was established in the UK in 1937 by
a group of literary intellectuals and anthropologists with the intention of
bringing the everyday lives of the ‘masses’ into the public domain, and to
record the subjective detail of social life that was not easily reduced to
statistics. Interestingly, I was not the first researcher to use Mass
Observation to elicit data about the everyday study of gambling. In 1947, the
National Anti-Gambling League (NAGL) commissioned Mass Observation to conduct a
qualitative study on the topic of everyday gambling; indeed, the opening
chapter to Rowntree and Lavers’ classic study of poverty in York was entitled ‘Mass
Gambling’ but revealingly included no reference to the 1947 data. In the course
of my research, I uncovered correspondence between Rowntree (who had formed and
financed NAGL) and Tom Harrisson at Mass Observation revealing that Rowntree
and Lavers had found the data too detailed, messy and lacking in ‘objective
argument’ (Casey, 2014). For me, this made the Mass Observation methodological
approach even more appealing, offering a route towards further exploring the
connections between gambling practice and the subjective experiences of class.
I received 214 detailed written responses and a sub-sample of 24 was chosen. I
selected accounts which most directly addressed the aims of the research
particularly around gambling and shifting class positions over time, and also
those that provided detailed autobiographical accounts.
One of the key themes to emerge from the
research was childhood experiences of gambling with the Observers devoting a good
deal of their time to writing about this. Some of these experiences were
nostalgic, sensory, even humorous, with, for example, some Observers talking
fondly about memories of trips to the seaside, of ‘my father taking a few coins
out of his purse and showing me how the (gambling) machine worked’; of going
with a grandfather to visit ‘Uncle Len’ which was a euphemism for the betting
shop; and of ‘Charlie our milkman taking bets on horses for us’. In some ways,
gambling memories offered a route to thinking about the past and recalling
family relations and activities of long ago. Frequently though, Observers
recalled difficult and traumatic experiences of gambling that were regularly
connected to experiences of growing up poor. It is important to note that the
majority of Mass Observers today tend to be middle class and to fall into
‘white collar’ categories of occupation, but that many were not middle class
from birth – rather they had experienced upward social mobility. The Observers
often consciously distanced themselves from those early childhood memories
which they identified with family poverty and unhappiness. One Observer for
example, directly distinguishes his own measured approach to gambling today
from the reckless spending of his father; ‘I have never gambled if I haven’t
got the money to waste; this did not apply to my father; he’d bet his last
penny as he didn’t think he’d lose’.
These stories of upward trajectories of class
acted as ‘parables of mobility’, mirroring wider discourses and stories of
social mobility which are interwoven into the British popular cultural
imagination. In his book The Moral Significance of Class, the British
sociologist Andrew Sayer describes these discourses as ‘heroic narratives’ of
‘bootstrapping’ (‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’). This also taps into
recent studies such as the cultural theorist Jo Littler’s account of the
popularization of the meritocracy myth or the popular ‘rage to riches’ fable
(2017). The difficult origins of the Observers are thus presented as a shedding
or a distancing of an old self from which ‘I have escaped’. These classed
trajectories and illuminations of humble beginnings were a very self-conscious
expression of upward social mobility and helped to illustrate ‘how far I have
come’. For example, ‘My father did the football pools every week during the
1960s … I think my dad may have had a system for completing his coupon probably
based on birthdays and house numbers (because) he could not read or write but
he could check his coupon’.
The Observers’ accounts represented an attempt
to distinguish themselves from the popular representations of the addicted,
pathological and reckless gambler, but moreover, they represented a struggle
over taste and value and an insistence that although they gambled
regularly, they would not drift into any ‘undesirable’ selfhoods that were
associated with the ‘irresponsible’ gambler. These findings echo wider
sociological research examining the complex subjectivities of class. In
particular, they chime with the work of the French cultural theorist Pierre
Bourdieu who points to class as a dynamic rather than a ‘fixed’ and homogenous
category and advocates analyses that examine how class is lived, produced,
reproduced and struggled over. For Bourdieu (1984), via a process of
‘distinction’, the ‘right’ to a middle-class identity is tightened via the
appropriation of expressions of disgust, judgement and disapproval of the
everyday cultural practices of those in other classes. The Observers echoed
this recognition of the value judgements of others, particularly of those who
are deemed to be ‘culturally lacking’ and who might be seen to engage in
‘flashy’ or ‘conspicuous’ consumption often synonymous with the ‘jet-set’
lottery winner stereotype. For example, one Observer describes her disgust at a
relative who refuses to ‘cover up’ the gambling that is the source of her
wealth; ‘a young man whose family have made their money from gambling: in an
amusement arcade in a seaside resort … its perfectly clear where the money
has come from. Their arcade is stuffed with fruit machines and other tacky
paraphernalia … Talk about getting your money for nothing’ (italics
mine).
Other research offers support to these
findings, for example Larsson’s (2011) study of how working-class lottery
winners in Sweden adopted strategies to ‘tame’ and ‘domesticate’ their
winnings, striving to ensure that their sudden economic wealth didn't disrupt
or change their identities and that they were able to ‘stay the same’
culturally. Thus, Observers were careful to resist what they saw as
‘ostentatious’ displays of wealth. One Observer describes a daydream of winning
the National Lottery where he would seize the opportunity to refuse the
identity of the ‘flashy’ and crass conspicuously consuming fabled lottery
winner:
If we did win a large sum of money on
the lottery, what I would love to do is wait until all the press was at my
door. A large bottle of champagne would be produced. They would ask us to shake
the bottle and squirt it round so they could take the normal boring
photographs. I would politely accept the bottle with thanks explaining that we
would drink it later.
Rapid research findings following the recent COVID-19
pandemic and ‘lockdown’ in the UK have demonstrated a disproportionate impact
on lower-income groups (ONS, 2021) who have often borne the brunt of the
economic and health consequences of the pandemic. Although overall gambling
participation has decreased since the beginning of the UK ‘lockdown’ in March
2020, in the UK we have also witnessed significant changes in the ways in which
people gamble including an increase
in online gambling. With the
subsequent removal of opportunities to gamble socially, wide speculation of a
global economic recession, combined with the increased vulnerabilities among
lower income groups to gambling related harms, including debt and mental health
issues, the current social situation in the UK is a perfect storm of increased
risk of gambling related harms and problem gambling among lower income gamblers
(see also van Schalkwyk et al., 2020). It is therefore, more important than
ever, that social scientists seek to examine the experiences and consequences
of gambling among lower-income groups, and that in doing so, these
understandings are underpinned by accounts of the cultural as well as the
economic experiences of class.
My previous work on gambling, undertaken in the UK during the beginning of an earlier period of economic downturn and austerity policies, described the impact of the looming uncertainty, anxieties and everyday stresses underpinning the everyday lives of a group of working-class, low-income women (Casey, 2008). I argued that for women, tasked with managing the wellbeing, health and care of the family on a limited and precarious budget, gambling had become engrained into weekly household spending practices and offered a small hope and daydream of security, calm and predictability. As Lady Florence Bell discovered a century before me in her study of everyday life and poverty in a manufacturing town in the north of England, ‘systematic betting of women ... is in many cases ... a quite deliberate effort to add to the income’ (1911, p. 354). Today, as Gerda Reith notes, in times of economic austerity, neo-liberal discourses, particularly of personal choice and the judgement and surveillance of others, become heightened (2018) and narratives of selfhood abound with vocabularies of autonomy and individual ‘choice’, personal pleasure and consumerism. Within such a structure, the individual is seen to be responsible for their own successes and failures. This is important for gambling scholars not only in terms of making sense of working-class gambling practice as a ‘personal’ and individual choice made within the context of wider socio-economic structures, but also in terms of developing gambling policy that moves beyond an over-reliance on ‘individual’ and ‘personal’ social responsibility and instead considers the wider economic, cultural and social contexts within which gambling exists.
Emma Casey is Associate Professor
of Sociology at Northumbria University, UK. She has written widely on class,
gender and everyday consumption practices and is the author of Women, Pleasure
and the Gambling Experience (reprinted in paperback 2016). Her work is at the
forefront of gambling research, developing methodological innovations for the
study of gambling in everyday life and exploring the relationships between
gambling and social inequalities.
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