It’s good to see that for all their bickering over Brexit and war of words over austerity, the Tories and Labour are firmly united on one point of view: that the poor must be saved from themselves. That the wretched are incapable of making sensible choices and therefore their betters must step in and make choices on their behalf. Behold the great bipartisan belief of 21st-century British politics: paternalism.
How else do we explain the cross-party effort to reduce the maximum bet one can place on a fixed-odds betting terminal — or FOBT — from £100 to £2? The government unveiled this state-mandated reduction in how much of our own money we can put inside a fruit machine this morning. The language ministers are using to justify these bureaucratic controls on dumb people’s desire to gamble is deeply patrician. These machines ‘prey on some of the most vulnerable in society’, said culture secretary Matt Hancock, as if the machines were monsters and ordinary people unthinking creatures easily sucked into a vortex of dependency.