Nowadays it’s a real struggle to pass a high street betting shop without nipping in for a crack at the

Nowadays, it’s a real struggle to pass a high street betting shop without nipping in for a crack at the touch-screen roulette machines that have quickly come to contribute more to bookies’ profits than all sports betting combined.To watch people play these electronic bandits is to glimpse the true extent of the menace. Bless his puritan heart, Gordon Brown is hardly the kind of man who gets home at 5am and mutters to his half-asleep wife, “I wouldn’t go using the credit card at Baby Gap for a bit, love. Black came up 17 times running …” No, with his dutiful Calvinist upbringing and love of fiscal caution, it’s a sure thing that this Chancellor disapproves violently of the weakness and frivolity required for a disastrous stint at the roulette table.As for the Secretary of State nominally responsible (as if she’d be allowed to blow her nose without Gordon’s express permission) for this new bill, Tessa Jowell is just the kind of breathily-concerned former psychiatric social worker who, in her heart of hearts, knows that the liberalisation of gaming is exceedingly dangerous.And so it is. My first month’s wages went in an hour chasing a recalcitrant 33 black in Cannes. On honeymoon in Atlantic City, they fed me enough free bourbon to ensure that, when we left Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal the next morning to catch the 747 home, I had to bum coins off a bellboy to get us through the New Jersey Turnpike.It has been thanks to the archaic severity of our gambling laws that I just about avoided becoming the kind of addict who routinely blows the mortgage.

I know this as well as most, having flirted with addiction for 25 years As a boy, the pocket money went in fruit machines. According to a scholarly, 900-page report called Double Or Quits? from the Midlands-based Global Betting and Gaming Consultants, the industry’s annual non-racetrack turnover – in betting shops and casinos, on the internet, and via interactive satellite channels (“press red,” was the message on a station I flicked past last night, “for 24 hour Roulette!) – has quintupled in four years to some £40bn; and will continue its rise once the forthcoming bill deregulating the casino business permits Vegas-style resort complexes, massive fruit machine jackpots and 24-hour casino drinking of the kind that led Wayne Rooney to blow some pocket money at poker the other night in Manchester while reportedly “blotto”.Somewhere in all this, you begin to sniff the familiar scent of hypocrisy. Of all the neuroses, irrationalities and minor lunacies covered by the Yiddish word “meshugas”, the one that irritates me most is patriotic pride. So deep and immovable are the roots of this tribal emotion that even those who find him the personification of Home Counties smugness can barely watch Tim Henman play for fear of him losing. World’s worst national anthem though it must be, few can hear the opening bars at an Olympic medal ceremony without welling up. Even the knowledge that Britain, in pursuance of that fabled “ethical foreign policy”, remains the planet’s second biggest exporter of arms is, on some gut level too hideous to contemplate, a source of satisfaction.
So it came as no surprise, settling down earlier this week with the Daily Mail’s front page, to feel that frisson of misplaced pride. An explosion of gambling, ran the story, “has lifted the British industry …

to become the biggest in Europe and third in the world, behind the US and Japan” And it gets better. “Analysts see it increasing at a similar pace and possibly becoming the most lucrative in the world.” We may no longer make anything anyone else would dream of buying (except for those armaments, of course, and Colman’s mustard), our post-Thatcherite utopia may be little more than a gigantic clearing house for global financial transactions, but so what? Within a decade, we could be world ranked number one at gambling.The figures are startling. Fifteen UK universities appeared in the top 150.The fact that our universities are achieving so much added value for the nation does not receive the credit it should. A recent article put it very well when it argued that the UK’s second place in the Shanghai university rankings was surely of greater note than the UK’s 10th place in the Olympics And yet this performance slipped by relatively unnoticed..

This has resulted in a doubling of the student-to-staff ratio, the scandalous neglect of academic pay, and the running down of much of the universities’ estate.Despite these handicaps, we retain many of our traditional strengths, thanks largely to the human capital that we enjoy in our universities. In the recent league table of the world’s top 500 universities produced by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, UCL was the fourth ranked UK institution, contributing to an overall second place, behind only the US, in the country table of the most successful institutions. We find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. At a time when higher education is booming, with a huge influx in the numbers in higher education, and substantial growth in the numbers who come to this country to study, our growth is limited by the fact that the leading UK institutions enjoy nothing like the level of funding of the leading universities overseas

We find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. The growth in student numbers, and the Government’s commitment to a participation rate of 50 per cent, has not been matched by a commensurate increase in funding. Sometimes this is because they are short of time; sometimes this is because they want to spare the feelings of the relatives. But by no means always.In this case, the sincerely held views of well-meaning people differed and could not be reconciled.