Independent, The (London): LETTER: Social consequences of excessive gambling

Sir: Hamish McRae (Opinion, 20 October) succinctly spells out why Britain may adopt Las Vegas-style gambling casinos to "help revive run- down city centres, both by attracting more visitors and more explicitly by forcing casino-owners to build other facilities - low- cost housing and the like". Meanwhile, Frank Field, the Labour MP for Birkenhead, has spelt out the appalling social cost, with the possibility of 700,000 "problem gamblers". This strikes me as being a classic Marxist dialectic wrapped up in market liberalism: the ends justifies the means, and the devil take the naive. American casinos are hardly in business to lose.

Has anyone calculated the hidden costs to the public purse of the "gamblers who have lost millions, stolen money to try to cover their tracks ... and the much larger number of lower-profile stories about wrecked marriages, suicides and attempted suicides, and rising vagrancy", that McRae refers to? Not likely. There are better ways of reviving run-down inner cities: investment in a decent transport infrastructure, for one, which would attract other business investment.

Tony Blair's New Labour has prided itself in its Christian rather than Marxist roots. In this case I much prefer the Methodism that deplores gambling to the neo-Marxist logic or indeed the market capitalism that promotes it.

MICHAEL SMITH

Initiatives of Change

London SW1