Viva Glas Vegas!

The super casino is coming soon to our biggest city – and with it an end to respectable, sombre old Scotland, says Ken Wright.

When a clergyman’s daughter kicks loose, they say, she can make the wildest daughters of the laity look like the Sunday School teacher she used to be. Thus it is with John Knox’s baby girl, Scotland , a formerly respectable lassie who nowadays thinks nothing of waking up on a strange sofa with 47p in her purse and her garments in disarray.

This is the country that in the swinging sixties still went to work on Christmas Day, where you couldn’t get a drink on a Sunday unless you were willing to get a bus out of town and sign “Donald Duck” in some skanky provincial hotel’s register of “bona-fide travellers”. Where unclean net curtains were social death, and to be seen entering an off-licence in daylight was the mark of the candidly way-past-caring. As for gambling, until still more recent times every betting shop stank like an ill-tended pissoir, and casinos – casinos! – were for James Bond, gangsters at leisure, and footballers on the razz.

Progress happens, though, and one chain at a time we threw off the shackles of shame. Only casino gambling remains as the last non-sexual entertainment that might, by the unco guid, be seen as not quite nice. You have to apply for membership, as to an internet pornography site. It takes place late at night when decent people are abed, in windowless upstairs rooms in shabby streets. You have to get dressed up for it, like a funeral, and you can’t even have a drink while you’re doing it. Surely it must be time to normalise and democratise this last redoubt of elitist and disreputable fun?

Glasgow city council seems to think so. For more than a year it has been hoping to pimp its citizenry to the big betting concerns as the best band of suckers for whom to establish Britain’s sole regional super-casino, a 24-hour adult Disneyworld where you can walk in whenever you like and spunk your pay without benefit of a “snobby” collar and tie. (The other Scottish contenders have folded their cards, leaving Glasgow as the last mug standing against the Millennium Dome and glamour spots including Cardiff , Nottingham and Sheffield .) What was once the retail fleecing of a couple of hundred mugs at a time, all of whom had explicitly signed up to the complicity of a kind of secret society, will be extended, if we get the nod from the government’s Casino Advisory Panel, to wholesale daily thousands in gaming rooms with 1250 no-limit slot machines on floor space as big as a football pitch.

Pandering to business has seldom, even in the craven context of Scottish municipal politics, surpassed the price Glasgow has been ordered to pledge in inward investment to win a licence to print other people’s money. Upgraded transport links, including the completion of the Glasgow Airport Rail System and the improvement of the Underground railway (satire admits defeat at the image of high rollers riding to a casino on the subway), are mandatory. Throw in automatic planning permission, and the local and national subsidies new businesses attract, and tens of millions of public money and money’s worth will be stuffed into this unholy piñata*. What is promised in return, apart from a guaranteed contribution to the national statistics on debt, depression, broken homes and generally fucked-up lives? (And don’t give me the old rhubarb about “sensible” gambling: there’s no thrill and no point unless you’re risking more than you can afford.)

Well, Glasgow could use some new jobs, obviously. The council burbles blissfully of several hundred people being directly hired, but a super-casino would create largely the kind of work that makes so many of Glasgow’s unemployed, very sensibly, prefer life on the sick: poverty-pay serfdom in cleaning and catering. A turn of a lucky card above that, jobs for as few clerks and managers as the business can get by with. Another turn, maybe two hundred jobs for dealers and croupiers at the frontline of robbery, working hours that destroy family life for the kind of income that might get you a mortgage on a garden shed. I used to be a casino gambler when I was young and stupid, and even when I lost badly I felt almost as sorry for the croupiers as for myself. Their haggard faces, above the décolleté gowns and monkey suits, read Please Kill Me Now.

And as for indirect job creation and economic growth, you don’t need a degree in economics to see through the claims of another two thousand jobs indirectly created by new local spending power and that of an estimated 600,000 visitors, or the believe-it-if-you-like concoction of £260 million a year in new national income. Gambling is the apotheosis of capitalism, cutting out the tiresome middleman of creating real wealth in goods and services – it sucks pure profit straight from the pocket – and money lost at gambling is simply money that its former owners would otherwise have spent on something more productive, such as groceries or housing. Expecting public wealth to grow out of it is the kind of fallacy that the Patents Office recognised a couple of hundred years ago, when it stopped granting patents on perpetual-motion machines.

Wallowing still deeper in the ditch of stupidity, the notion that a Glasgow supercasino would be a popular visitor attraction is so helplessly pathetic that I feel like I’m clubbing baby seals to contradict it. But let’s be realistic: who on earth is going to travel to Glasgow – proposed locations include Ibrox and St Enoch’s Square – to piss away money that he could have pissed away in any of the many non-super casinos closer to home, or further away on a cheap flight to the States? When Elvis sang “Bright lights city gonna set my soul, gonna set my soul on fire”, the song was called Viva Las Vegas, not Glas Vegas. The appeal of Nevada ’s City of Lost Wages I can understand, having a soft spot for the kitsch aesthetic, but Glasgow could never match its gruesome glamour – or give you free drinks and fifty-cent breakfasts, either.

I’ve assumed throughout this composition that you know the player can’t beat the house. If you don’t know that already, I’d be wasting ink to tell you why. Let me just remind you of the poster campaign for Glasgow ’s newest casino, opened a couple of years ago, that encouraged potential punters to fantasise sophisticated alter-egos under names like Johnny Aces or Lady Baccarat. It didn’t mention that they’d be Johnny Loser or Stupid Tart – the contempt of casino owners and staff for their marks is bottomless – when they’re walking home in the rain, short of even the cabfare, maybe to tell the spouse that the mortgage money went south on a hard 21 at blackjack when the dealer drew ace-10. Let me just say that a super-casino here would be an unnecessary addition to the many ways in which the rich are already entitled to rob the poor. I’d rather have, for all its faults, the Scotland that was serious and solemn, even sombre. I’d rather have Scotland the grave.

* A piñata is a papier-mache effigy of a donkey, stuffed with sweets and hung from a tree at Latin American festivities for the children to beat with sticks until it bursts.