Financial Risk Checks for Gambling

Debate between Julian Lewis and Philip Davies

Monday 26th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

My hon. Friend does not even need to talk about products that are that addictive. As one of my constituents has pointed out, no one checks on him if he spends £150 on a dinner for two people. Would he accept that, even if the principle is conceded that there should be some checks, the level at which this has been set is far too low?

[Philip Davies]

I very much agree with my right hon. Friend, as I happily do on most things. Of course people spend more than they should on all those other things, but the Government are snobbishly only treating punters as some kind of pariah, which I do not appreciate.

In Parliament, we should stand up for people’s freedoms. I was not elected to Parliament to stop everyone else doing all the things I do not happen to like myself, but some Members seem to think their job is to do nothing other than that. It is unacceptable that the Government, the Gambling Commission and the bookmakers will basically, between them, decide how much each individual punter can afford to spend on their betting, and the punter gets virtually no say whatsoever. It is completely outrageous. The Conservative party used to believe in individual freedom and individual responsibility, and some of us still do.

If we asked how much responsibility each group should take for determining how much somebody can afford to spend on betting, I doubt anyone would say that the individual concerned should have 0% responsibility, but that is the route down which we are in danger of going. It is absurd to think that bookmakers and regulators should be able to decide how much each individual person in the country should be allowed to spend on betting. When people open an online betting account or the next time they log in, perhaps they should be forced to enter how much they want to limit their spend over a fixed period. The responsibility for ensuring that they do not go over that should rest with the bookmaker, but not the decision as to how much they can afford in the first place.

Lifeboat Services: Search and Rescue

Debate between Julian Lewis and Philip Davies

Tuesday 10th January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

It is a privilege to take part in this debate, and our thanks are due to my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) for making that possible.

We all come to an awareness of volunteer lifeboat crews in different ways. In my case, it was as a schoolboy growing up in Swansea. I remember in the 1950s visiting the Mumbles lifeboat and noting its unusual name. It was called the William Gammon, and it was in later years that I learned the reason for that. It was named after a particularly heroic coxswain of a previous lifeboat—a man who had been awarded a bronze and a gold medal for incredibly brave rescues in 1941 and 1944, but lost his life, together with seven colleagues in his crew, in the great disaster of 23 April 1947, when a former Liberty ship, the SS Samtampa, broke up off Sker Point off the coast of south Wales.

I remember going to the reference library on a research project and looking at the South Wales Evening Post report of that disaster. The headline—I think I am right in rendering it—said: “One terrible tragedy after another in the channel”. It showed the upturned lifeboat and the wrecked ship. That image has never left me. It is a tradition of which everybody who volunteers to serve in lifeboats is all too aware.

In those days, one had to go back to the newspapers to try to relive the experiences and heroism of the lifeboat crews, but today we have modern media. If colleagues on both sides of the Chamber take away only one thought from my brief contribution, it should be this: I urge them to go online and have a look at a BBC documentary called “Cruel Sea”. They can find it on YouTube. It was made in 2006 to mark the 25th anniversary of another disaster—the loss of the Penlee lifeboat. It is a quite extraordinary piece of television; they will never forget it, and I advise them to have a box of Kleenex tissues by their side. I have seen it several times, and I always find it hard to maintain my composure.

The documentary is about the way in which that crew and its coxswain, the late Trevelyan Richards, went out to try to rescue eight people on a vessel, the Union Star, whose engines had failed and was drifting toward the rocks. It contains the actual recordings of the messages that went back from the Penlee lifeboat to the command station, which tried to communicate with the boat. At one point—this was watched by a helicopter crew who were powerless to intervene but saw everything—the crew had managed to get four of the eight people off the ship. The waves were 60 foot high. The Penlee lifeboat was lifted up and actually came down on the deck of the ship it was trying to save the crew from, before being washed off. The crew went back one last time to try to get the last four people, and at that point they were lost.

The thought that remains with me is the calmness of the voice of Trevelyan Richards in moments of extreme peril, right up to the point at which the radio goes silent and we just hear the command station calling, “Penlee lifeboat, Penlee lifeboat, come in.” Of course, it never could. It is an unforgettable programme. It is a great tradition that, to this day, comes down to independent lifeboats such as Solent Rescue, which operates from Lepe in my constituency, and to RNLI stations such as RNLI Calshot. It operates with a 112-foot tower at Calshot Spit, with the aid of the National Coastwatch Institution, spotting the people who get into difficulties in the Solent. Frankly, these are the finest people we will ever know. I do not think I can say anything further than that.

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

I thank all Back-Bench speakers for their discipline and self-restraint, which is much appreciated.