Lord Lipsey
Main Page: Lord Lipsey (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Lipsey (Lab)
My Lords, I declare an interest as half-owner of Fearless Fantasy, which takes a chance in the bumper at eight o’clock at Exeter tomorrow, which happens to be my birthday.
The House is indebted to the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, for giving the Government a chance to give a straight answer as to what has happened to the racing right. Noble Lords will remember that the racing right made a cameo appearance in the 2015 Budget speech to give the Chancellor’s friend Mr Hancock something cheery to tell his Newmarket constituents at the general election. That purpose has been served, so, in the immortal words of Monty Python, the racing right “is not pining, it has passed on, it is no more, it has ceased to be, it has expired and gone to meet its maker”. As it was unworkable, unfair, and probably illegal, thank God for that.
What takes its place? In March 2016, the Government published perhaps the thinnest paper in the history of Whitehall, Implementing the Replacement for the Horserace Betting Levy. I have studied it, but I have no clue what it proposes. I commend to the House the briefing by Olswang’s Dan Tench, a leading gambling lawyer, which asks six crucial, fundamental questions that the document utterly fails to address. These include:
“The need and/or justification of any levy or funding for Racing in light of the revenue it now receives in terms of the sale of media rights”.
Even if the Government find an answer to Mr Tench’s six questions, which they show no inclination to yet, they will face the fundamental problem of getting European state aid approval—odds against, if not long odds against.
So here is a puzzle. What is the answer to Mr Tench’s question? Why are this free-market Government proposing a massive new intervention in the market in one case and one case only—horseracing? They are not doing it for greyhound racing, you will notice, but they are doing it for horseracing. I am afraid that the answer is all too simple and predictable. There is one principle which Ministers in this Government hold even more dear than free-market economics: that money should be taken from the poor—that is to say, poor punters in betting shops—and given to the rich owners, such as me.