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Welcome to the News desk. |
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New taxes kill UK's passion for bingo night |
11/5/2008 |
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Ned Temko
'Two and four, twenty-four ... Seven and nine, seventy-nine ... All
the sevens, seventy-seven!'
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Bingo Card |
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The voice belongs to Dawn
Milton, 'caller' for the past eight years at the Harlow Bingo Club in Essex.
Blonde and boisterous, these days she is also agitated and apprehensive. Nearly
100 bingo clubs around Britain have shut their doors in the past three years -
more than a dozen since the start of this year. Milton can't help worrying how
the trend will affect even Harlow, one of the most successful clubs. It is not
just a business, she insists, but provides a 'safe, sociable night out' for its
thousands of members.
More than three million people across the country
regularly play bingo, a pastime with its roots in the tombola fund-raisers of
nearly a century ago. But the major commercial chains such as Gala and Rank's
Mecca bingo have seen their profits slashed by political and economic
constraints - with little sign until recently that the industry's cries for
help are being heard in Whitehall.
'The smoking ban hit us badly,' says Milton,
'particularly when the cold weather set in last winter.' But the industry
bosses' main gripe is that, alone among gaming businesses, bingo faces 'double
taxation' - the gambling profits' levy as well as VAT. And under the
government's new gambling legislation, bingo halls have also had to cut back
drastically on the number of their profitable £500 jackpot machines.
While small crowds clustered around the few remaining machines last
Sunday evening, the key attraction was still in the main hall, as Milton called
out the bingo numbers, the nearly 900 players hunched over their booklets
ticked off hits with felt-tip markers, winners shouted in excitement and
near-winners gasped as she moved on to the next line. 'Yes, it's partly about
winning money,' Milton said. 'But it's more than that. We're the only club for
miles around, and for some of our regular members it is also being part of a
community.'
A group of women in their thirties agreed. 'It's a night
out,' one remarked. 'If this place closed, it would be terrible. There's
nowhere else we could go out together on a Sunday night.'
A study by
the Henley Centre research group, commissioned last year by the Bingo
Association to chart the effects of the closure of bingo clubs in Scotland and
the Midlands, found that particularly among older women whose small local clubs
had closed there was a major 'social' effect. 'For regular members, going out
to bingo is the primary, and sometimes only, leisure activity out of the
house,' it concluded. 'While money is a key trigger to begin playing and
remains an important motivation, the drive to play bingo regularly is largely
orientated around a need for social interaction and belonging.'
The
leading academic expert on bingo, Dr Carolyn Downs of Manchester Metropolitan
University, is sceptical about 'overstating' its social role. But she agrees
that as a 'regular' activity, particularly among older women, 'it is a place
where they can meet their friends, and in those settings bingo perhaps plays a
very different role'.
Sustaining that social lifeline amid the club
closures has suddenly landed the government with a new headache after the
backbench rebellion over abolition of the 10p tax rate - underscored by the
Conservative capture of Harlow amid the Labour meltdown in local elections.
Though pundits called the Tory victory a shock result, anyone who had taken the
political temperature at the previous Sunday's bingo night in Harlow would have
seen it coming. The 10p tax 'betrayal' was the main complaint, but for many
members - in a town whose council the Tories failed to win even under Thatcher-
it was seen as part of a pattern of assaults alongside the smoking ban and the
perceived lack of support for their bingo club.
On the eve of the
elections, the Sports Minister, Gerry Sutcliffe, hinted in a speech to the
Bingo Association's annual meeting at a possible loosening on the number of
£500 jackpot machines to shore up bingo clubs' finances.
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