Sunday Mirror: Racing: The end of the world?

YOU might think the end of the world is not so much nigh, as rushing headlong towards us to drag the innocent citizens of Britain down to perma-roast in the flames of hell.

That's judging by some of the hysterical reaction after the Government published its proposed Gambling Bill earlier in the week.

Reading some of the papers you'd believe that after this bill has gone through, this country will make Sodom and Gomorrah look like Center Parcs.

Tesco and Asda will be emptied as gambling-crazed housewives throng the new super-casinos from Dumfries to Dover, children will starve at home.

Packs of feral dogs will roam the streets as mums and dads spend the Winalot budget losing a lot at the blackjack tables, then "shoot craps" 24 hours a day before going out to shoot themselves to escape billions of pounds worth of debt.

Few countries do puritanical pomposity better than we do and making total plonkers of ourselves has never put our rulers off.

When that wicked perversion Premium Bonds was invented, Prime Minister Harold MacMillan dismissed it loftily as "a squalid raffle".

And when betting shops were legalised in the early Sixties there were plenty who thought civilisation as we knew it would be extinct in less time than it takes to soft-boil an egg.

Of course one takes problem gambling seriously. Corrosive and insidious, it has very similar addictive qualities to alcohol, drugs and cigarettes - and I have known punting addicts and seen the misery of their struggle as they try to shake free.

But the idea that the new casinos will be some wild-card unregulated sphere of activity is utter nonsense.

In the 1990s we opened up the fronts of betting shops for the first time so the public could see us sinners within. That move transformed the flat-cap, Rizla and lino image of betting shops for ever.

It made them more appealing and safer for staff without leading to some explosion in punting. In tandem with the new super-casinos, fruit machines will be removed from takeaways and similar outlets where the young can fritter away their money.

We have a hugely responsible history of legislating our betting in this country and that tradition is not going to evaporate overnight. So how exactly will the proposed new legislation affect racing?

To start with, gambling debts will become recoverable by law for the first time with the tariff being set at up to 51 weeks in prison and/or a fine of up to pounds 5,000.

More significantly for you and me, the "opportunity" has opened up to race on Good Friday and Christmas Day.

Currently Good Friday is a rest day for the wallet and I think it would be a shame if we raced on it, partly out of a residual feeling that it is a day which carries with it a solemnity deserving of special respect - but also because we already have an overload of rankly indifferent racing and need less wall-to-wall rubbish, not more.

As for Christmas Day, that has to be a total non-starter and any racecourse chief who decides to race on that greatest of family days should suffer a similar fate to the man who gave us Good Friday. Racing on Christmas Day would be a disaster. We already have the mass- meeting delights of Boxing Day, lit up last year by Edredon Bleu enjoying his finest hour in winning the King George.

And both stable and betting shop staff, overworked and underpaid, need a glimpse of civilisation as we already ask too much of them.

Christmas is stressy enough as it is without dad saying: "I'm off to Huntingdon because you have cremated the turkey for the last 20 years when all the time it should have been your mother who went in the oven."

I think there is no appetite to race on Christmas Day. This year we have no racing on December 23 or 24 and the entrance to any racecourse on the 25th will be blocked by my dead body.

More effectively, I will whack Big Mac over the head and stick him outside the turnstiles - that will stop anyone getting in.