Subjects:

Licensing Law

Contents:

PART ONE: THEN

1. Gaming in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

2. Gaming in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Gaming Act 1845

3. Gaming in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

4. Gaming Machines: The Challenge of New Technology

5. The Rise and Fall of the State Lottery: The State Lotteries 1694-1826

6. The Re-emergence of Private and Semi-private Lotteries: 1823-1922

7. From the Local to the National: The Re-emergence of The Public Lottery

8. Betting and Bookmaking: Social class and the racecourse bookmaker

9. Street Betting: Enacting Prohibition

10. Street Betting: Prohibition and its Consequences

11. Going to the Dogs: Gambling, Leisure, and the Home Office

PART TWO: NOW

12. The Social and Economic Regulation of Commercial Gambling: A Model

13. The Regulation of Commercial Gaming

14. The Regulation of the National Lottery

15. The Implementation of the National Lottery: Concerns and Consequences

16. Deregulation and Structural Change

Three quarters of the British population gamble (mainly on the National Lottery), and they generate around 46 billion pounds a year. This volume sets recent developments in the regulation and deregulation of its three primary forms - betting, gaming, and lotteries - against an account of their social and legal history. Many of the concerns that excite controversy today are little different from those with which the Home Office grappled for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Based upon Home Office files and contemporary accounts, this book begins by evaluating how the law was used to control and suppress popular gambling. Miers shows how and why prohibition gave way to the recognition that regulation offered a more effective method of controlling a social pastime that, by the mid-twentieth century, had become a feature of everyday life. Concerns over gambling have recently resurfaced, as a result of Government proposals to replace the existing strict controls with a regulatory regime that will give greater scope for licensees to adopt more competitive practices. Like the introduction of the National Lottery in 1994, these proposals represent a marked departure from the