I was told this morning by breathless news readers that we would have it confirmed that civilization was about to collapse, and it was all down to all that nasty gambling that’s been going on.

Well I happened to be lucky enough to see the 9.30 news conference where the Gambling Commission announced that most people are normal, and have a normal ability to resist spunking their hard-earned away.  That said, he also said some people do not fit in to that bracket, and we should be conscious of the temptations in their way.

This certainly fitted in to my own recent experience when I went in to a casino for the first time.  All dreams of suavely breaking the house whilst ordering Martinis went out the window with the words, “fuck that for a game of marbles” when I saw that it was a fiver a hand.  If I was going to waste that kind of money on idle recreation, I’d go down the lapdancing clubs where, quite interestingly, it is also “a fiver a hand.”

I loved this press conference because you could almost hear the journalists’ disappointment as they realised that they were going to have to think up a whole new demon all on their own.   He started by saying the first “big message” was that overall gambling had gone down (this was measured by counting the number of people who had gambled in any form in the last year).  If you remove the National Lottery, gambling had gone up slightly from 46% to 48% of the population.  But what was brilliant was his point that problem gambling had moved from 0.8% to 0.9% of all gamblers. So his second “big message” (he was big on big messages) was that there had been no statistically significant change in problem gambling in the UK in the last seven years.

Better still he went on to say that 99.9% of the population had a perfectly healthy relationship with gambling, and there was no reason to worry about them.

As if to ram the point home he then went on to say that Britain isn’t too bad, with only two countries having lower rates of problem gambling, six approximately similar and five that were worse.

What amuses me (but also really annoys me) is that if the results had gone any other way it would be all over the news.  I’ve had News 24 on in the background for an hour now, and it doesn’t even feature.  I even had to nose around on the BBC website a bit to find the story.

This isn’t a rant about “why is there never any good news on the tellybox?”  After all, a fairly dry statistical analysis about gambling habits is never going to be a jolly read whatever it says.  But why hasn’t it been reported that actually gambling isn’t the demon it’s been painted to be.  Nor was the minimum wage, or trade union recognition, the Human Rights Act or extended drinking hours.  And I don’t recall one million refugees turning up on the day and date predicted by the Daily Mail a couple of years ago.  Thousands of column inches have been wasted on how each one of these would cause the sky to fall in, yet when that doesn’t happen, no-one gets to challenge the media about it.

Perhaps this is where blogs come in.  Perhaps I’m beginning to see the democratizing effect of them, beyond just giving me an opportunity to sound off (and invariably use the word “cunt” at some time in my piece.  I will try to do one without the word sooner or later).

So a) what is it about this country that makes us so self-hating that we only enjoy it when we can beat ourselves up about how generally shit we are.  An English friend who has lived in the Netherlands, San Diego and Berlin in the last five years says it is a peculiarly British trait that now drives him bonkers.  This attitude seems to pervade any discussion from gambling to the weather, via drugs and public services.  Jules, being demi-Francais, what is your view?

and b) can we have our supercasino back, Mr Brown?  Or are you going to continue to be the duplicitous and opportunistic little cunt you have already demonstrated yourself to be about this and at least two other major issues I can think of.  After all, my little son of the Manse, it’s what the Commons voted for.