Statistics may be dull, but they serve an important role as the enemy of public health zealots. These killjoys often believe that even just one person being harmed is enough to justify any number of bans, even when the most basic of calculations can challenge them.
Recently, I was invited onto BBC Sunday Morning Live to discuss one such topic – whether gambling addiction should be considered a public health issue. This was off the back of newly published NICE guidelines, which suggest that GPs should be able to spot the signs of problem gamblers. I argued that, while addiction is a complex cognitive condition that should be diagnosed by a medical professional, inflating the definition of what it means to be harmed by gambling, as many extremist campaigners like to do, only deprives those in genuine need of the finite resources that we have to treat them.
The numbers reveal no justification for dressing up gambling addiction as though it were a pandemic. NHS surveys have consistently put the rate of problem gambling in the UK at 0.3% and 0.6% – around 190,500 – 390,000 people. These are Accredited Official Statistics, meaning the UK Statistics Authority is assured of their reliability. Nannying campaigners will cite the Gambling Survey for Great Britain, which puts the rate of problem gambling at 2.5%, despite the fact that, among its many other methodological flaws, only 19% of those requested to respond to the survey did so.
This point was quickly rebuffed by fellow guest Will Prochaska, Leader of the activist group Coalition to End Gambling Ads. Predictably, what followed were a flurry of misleading statistics about gambling harms. I read from a letter from the Government’s regulator, the Gambling Commission, describing Will’s use of statistics as ‘a mischaracterisation’ and not based on reliable data. Surely we could not discuss whether something could be considered a public health issue if we cannot be honest about the numbers.
Even when presented with this concrete evidence, the presenter continued to give the statistics airtime. She then steered the conversation with ‘OK, let’s say there are a million people in England who have an issue with their gambling’. Why? Why would we say that if there demonstrably aren’t?
Misusing statistics is a trick as old as time, but it has significant implications for public health policy, and it’s us left footing the bill.
It wouldn’t be so easy to do this if the burden of proof for nanny-state obsessives wasn’t so shockingly low. Perhaps this is because many seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that all public health groups are still considered to be the trustworthy ‘little guys’, in contrast to what they would describe as self-interested, profiteering companies. This is a rather antiquated view. In 2023, PETA, a pressure group that believes animals and humans should have zero interaction, received almost $75 million (£59 million) in public donations. Charities such as these are better described as campaign corporations, operating with vast amounts of money, and often gaining outsized influence over public policy.
The public health brigade have exploited in this environment, dialling up their rhetoric with little regard for the evidence, a strategy learned from their cousins in the climate change movement.
In the early 2000s, we had a ‘climate crisis’. When it was established that did not evoke enough urgency, we suddenly had a ‘climate emergency’ on our hands. Anti-gambling extremists have done similar; rather than argue that without sensible modifications, gambling may harm more people in the future, particularly with the advent of new technology, they have mischaracterised statistics to make it sound as though a disaster is unfolding at unprecedented levels right now – 55,000 children addicted to gambling (debunked), 400 suicides a year (also debunked). They have recognised that in doing this, in evoking this sense of urgency, there is no limit to what they can demand from politicians.
The cost of all of this ultimately ends up with the taxpayer. We do not have enough resources to pretend a problem that affects 0.3% of the adult population of Great Britain qualifies as a public health issue. With the NHS already under immense strain post-Covid, we cannot afford to operate under a precautionary principle of ‘better to act irrationally than not to act at all’.
Unless we can get a grip on misleading statistics, those who seek a greater nanny state will always win.
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