An irresponsible gamble

Out-of-date law and human nature mean sports betting is more than harmless fun – it ruins lives, argues Sam Tomlin.

Sam Tomlin

Sam Tomlin is a Salvation Army officer, leading a local church in Liverpool where he lives with his wife and children.

Lars Schmidt, via Wikimedia Commons.

On 21st April 2021 husband and father of two young children Luke Ashton took his own life. Suicide is the biggest cause of death for men under 50 in the UK, but this suicide had a particular source. As recounted by his widow and now anti-gambling campaigner Annie, Luke developed a gambling disorder linked to his support of Leicester City and football gambling more generally. Getting furloughed in the pandemic exacerbated the problem and he succumbed to aggressive advertising on his smart phone, losing more and more money to the point of despair and no return.

I am not surprised to hear of stories like Luke’s. That’s because I am a Salvation Army officer. Some may view the pledge to give up all forms of gambling when you join its ranks as archaic and over-the-top, but this insistence by the Salvation Army, which was founded in the 1800’s, was a response to the devastation to lives addiction can cause. Far from being a thing of the past, gambling continues to wreak havoc, especially in poor communities like the one I live and serve in today. I have had personal items stolen and pawned to fund gambling addictions and have heard of people losing thousands of pounds in a few hours.

Recently our church was part of a local campaign to stop an iconic building from being turned into a cashino, something which we and others in our community knew could have a devastating impact. Thankfully the company withdrew the application, probably because of local opposition, but areas of high socio-economic deprivation like ours are always under such threat.

If you force young people to endorse addictive products, don’t be surprised if they use them.

I have friends who gamble on sport and tell me it is just harmless fun. It makes the experience more exciting when you have money on it, they say, something sports betting companies focus on in their advertising. While not every gambler is a problem gambler (Public Health England estimates there are 2.2 million who either are problem gamblers or are at risk of addiction), I am not convinced that it is harmless fun for two main reasons.

Firstly, the risk of ‘harmless’ gambling turning into problem gambling is not adequately managed by UK legislation. The 2005 Gambling Act refers more to gambling by post than online gambling and was passed at a time before smart phones. This legislation, intended to boost the economy through liberalising gambling laws, has allowed sports gambling to spiral out of control; 40% of Premier League clubs are sponsored by a betting company with many more in lower divisions. Concerns have been raised about transparency on behalf of these betting companies and it seems clear that these companies exploit the Premier League’s global profile to reach potential customers in countries like China where gambling advertising is banned. Aston Villa recently responded to a supporter backlash against a new sponsorship deal but made it clear that money talks: for clubs outside the top six (who can attract significantly greater deals), betting firms offer ‘twice as much financially as non-gambling companies.’

My team, Bristol City, had a gambling sponsor for many years until this season – although ironically children’s shirts had the sponsor changed in a tacit acknowledgement of potential harm. Hypocrisy in football betting runs much deeper though. Ivan Toney the Brentford striker currently faces a lengthy ban for a breach of the FA’s betting rules, but as The Big Step campaign (led by people harmed by gambling) pointed out – with various pictures of Toney receiving awards and shirts with gambling sponsors on them - ‘If you force young people to endorse addictive products, don’t be surprised if they use them.’

It is almost impossible to watch a match on TV without being bombarded with free bet offers and the latest deals with former players enticing fans to gamble their money with a few simple clicks on their phones. One recent study questions whether it is possible to gamble responsibly in an age of smart phones, and outlines significant potential harm even for ‘low and moderate risk gamblers — including relationship problems, being distracted, lost opportunities across work and personal life, secretive behaviours, and a compulsion to open and continually re-engage with the app.’

A review of the Gambling Act is currently being carried out, but frustration is growing as publication is delayed. While a blanket prohibition on gambling would neither be practical or desirable, campaigners hope that steps will be taken to restrict gambling advertising in much the same way that advertising for smoking has been banned. The gambling industry cite the contribution gambling brings to the economy, but a report by the Social Market Foundation suggested that tighter regulation could actually boost the economy and in 2016 it was estimated that gambling addiction cost the economy £1.2bn a year. For a society built on an understanding of ‘freedom,’ however, as defined by challenging anything that might hinder our individual wills, gambling may constitute the example par excellence of the confluence of social and economic liberalism. Any significant change to legislation will be hard-won.

The second reason is that gambling promises more than it can ever actually deliver. This is why it so often ends in harmful addiction – it can never truly satisfy what are ultimately spiritual needs, so it continues to draw you further and further in until you are no longer in control but it controls you.

There are perhaps three main reasons people gamble: the desire to win money, the social aspect and the thrill or excitement. There is no doubt that gambling offers the possibility of fulfilment, to some degree, for all these things: occasionally people win large sums of money, it can make sport more exciting and help make the social experience more fun.

We are indeed made for community and the communal enjoyment of sport.

As Christians see it, however, gambling offers an unreliable and ultimately unsatisfying route to fulfilling these desires. The Bible warns us about the love of money and encourages honest work as opposed to chance for earning what we need to live It also points to the importance of charity and justice for those who do not have enough. We are made for community and the communal enjoyment of sport is a gift from God (as I have written about in the past). It is perfectly possible, however, to enjoy sport without gambling – really supporting and following a team or player comes with enough ups and downs to produce a wide range of emotions; I have cried, bitten my nails, hidden my head in my hands and hugged random strangers often during one single game. It could be argued that even non-problem gambling contributes to fund an industry that demonstrably preys on vulnerable people, failing the command to love our neighbour.

We are also created to experience thrill and excitement beyond the mundane aspects of everyday life, but the greatest drama according to the Christian faith is found in being caught up in God’s redemption of the world, ‘reconciling all things to himself’ as we read in the New Testament. As many Christians will testify – even the most exciting Hollywood film is a pale imitation of the excitement and drama of giving up your life to follow the way of Jesus, and this is certainly true of the fleeting and temporary thrills experienced through gambling.

Unlike some religions which want to supress desire, the Christian faith affirms desire as a good thing. The question is, what our desire is aimed at. Augustine once said that our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. Created things or activities like sex, possessions, money or experiences are good when enjoyed in the right context, but when – like with gambling - they promise more than they can deliver, more often than not it ends in dissatisfaction and potentially even disaster as Luke Ashton’s story tragically demonstrates.

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Justice

Redemption

15 May 2025

4 min read

The case of Peter Sullivan proves once and for all why we shouldn’t bring back the death penalty

It’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done - it’s all of us.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A court sits, with judges raised above the others.

The Court of Appeal.

Judiciary.uk.

The quashing of the conviction this week of Peter Sullivan, who served 38 years in jail for a murder he did not commit – along with the release in 2023 of Andrew Malkinson, cleared of rape after 17 years inside – are deeply shameful. They are revolting stains not only on our judiciary, but on all those who politically invigilate it and on the rest of us who elect them. We should all be deeply ashamed.

As we peep through our fingers at these terrible travesties of justice and the lives that have needlessly been wrecked, it’s natural to ask what we do next. In the absence of time travel, we can hardly make it up to Messrs Sullivan and Malkinson.

But we can grapple with what they mean to us for the immediate future. Probably the first and easist thing to say is – if I may not so much mix a metaphor as summarily execute it – that they should hammer legislatively the final nail in the coffin of the death penalty.

Sullivan would doubtless have swung for the murder of florist Diane Sindall in 1986 that he did not commit, if execution by hanging (or by other means) had not been abolished in 1965. True, rape hasn’t been a capital offence since 1841, when the penalty became transportation (which was almost as irreversible as death).

But Malkinson’s case rather makes the point: The very fact that he was still incarcerated meant that he could be released. Let’s take a case in which no such remedy was available – Derek Bentley, say, who was hanged in 1953 for allegedly abetting the murder of a police officer and exonerated, a trifle late, in 1998.

The arguments of thornproof and white-knuckled proponents of the death penalty may be as swiftly dispatched as they would wish such innocent victims to be. They were probably “wrong ‘uns” anyway. Their sacrifice would have discouraged others from committing heinous crimes. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay for their decades in the slammer. Well, pah. Try telling any of that to the Sullivan family.

But these are not, to my mind, the biggest issues and, enormous as they are, that must make the biggest pretty gargantuan. I wish to address the business of redemption.

But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

Now, when I mention this word to those holding the pitchforks, prodding people they despise towards the scaffold, they usually assume I’ve come over all pious and priestly. And I suppose I have. But they invariably misunderstand what we mean by redemption.

The assumption is that the victim of the miscarriage of justice can be redeemed if they are still alive. Their life is in some way redeemed from suffering. That’s true, so far as it goes, but it’s not really what we should mean by redemption in these circumstances.

The Latin root of the word refers to the buying back, or the paying of the ransom, of a slave to enable his or her freedom. The ancient scriptural usage of the word relates often to the saving actions of the Hebrews’ God, in redeeming his people from slavery in Egypt, and to the Christian culmination of that redeeming work at the cross (totally uncoincidentally, both events are commemorated at the Jewish Passover, that first divine covenant being, in Christianity, fulfilled in the second).

The debate down the ages has substantially concentrated on to whom the ransom of that latter redemption was paid. For some, it was paid to a vengeful and wrathful God, for others to a somewhat gullible Satan, who took the bait of pay-off. Either way, a debt was paid which released humanity from bondage and slavery.

The theology of this can only be satisfactory to a proportion of people who read it, whether believers or not. The important matter is to whom the act of redemption is of value. A slave who died building a pyramid for a pharaoh doesn’t seem to have been redeemed in any more meaningful sense than the young Bentley being pardoned 45 years after he was hanged. Exoneration isn’t redemption.

In the Christian tradition, it’s significant that the compilers of the gospels and the books thereafter develop less the idea of ransom to explain the cross, than the idea of deliverance from bondage that was its result.

And there the answer, rather than the victims, hangs before us. We can’t redeem the injustice of the past, anymore than we can give Sullivan and Malkinson back their lost years. But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

To those who claim that murderers and rapists “get off” because of “loopholes” in the law, we say there are no loopholes, only the law. And we’re all enriched when we get the law right. So, ultimately, it’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done and they’re finally released. It’s all of us.