Luck of the draw

We need neither like nor dislike lotteries to recognise that the National Lottery has had a profound effect on British life. When its jackpot reached ?40m, tickets were sold to the equivalent of 90 per cent of the adult population. In its first financial year the amount spent on gambling in Britain rose by a third. This need not be a disaster. Many countries have lotteries; good causes-from the Sydney Opera House to hospitals-are funded by them. Furthermore, like most forms of gambling, they give pleasure: in anticipation; in winning; in thinking that next time we shall be lucky. Things which give people pleasure should not be quickly disparaged. But our Lottery is changing British culture in an unwelcome manner.
The British are notoriously a race of gamblers, but the Lottery represents a marked break with tradition. Historically, the British drew a clear distinction between "betting" and "gambling"; the former has been the dominant tradition. Betting, on horses or football (via the pools), say, was thought to demand knowledge and intellectual ability; gambling (at bingo, say) merely luck. To bet, you needed to know things. A huge industry developed to provide them: tipsters, form guides, "sporting" newspapers, people who knew people who had it from the horse's mouth, and-at least until off-course cash betting was legalised in 1961-the indispensable agent of all this, the street-bookie. The British way of betting constituted a system of knowledge which, unlike others, was open to all working men and women. Someone who betted successfully acquired the same esteem as a middle class professional.
Betting was closely tied to the rhythms of work: men (not women, on the whole) bet on the way to work; bet and talked about betting at work; bet on the way home. Many turned betting into work. In part, it defined their relationship with work; even when it acted as an antidote (for some, it did) it was part of the culture of work. Betting was also a factor in family life. Football pools were frequently filled in by the whole family: setting aside one evening each week to do the pools was common. Traditionally, betting was thus tied in with the everyday life of most British people.
The National Lottery is different. First, it is unquestionably gambling-like the once derided bingo. While there is much hocus-pocus about the choice of Lottery numbers, there is not even a pretence that the purchase of a ticket or the selection of numbers requires intellect or knowledge. It can be argued that many people both bet and gamble-clearly, many do. But it is also clear that many who buy Lottery tickets-particularly women-have never bet and that a larger proportion of men now gamble than ever did before. Above all, the Lottery severs the link between wagering and work (or, indeed, wagering and the family). The Lottery is the antithesis of work; it is the culture of "fun" or-since the poor buy Lottery tickets disproportionately-the rather desperate culture of hope. The success of the Lottery is therefore both the result and the symbol of an important moment in modern British history: the moment when our national culture ceased to be work-based and when the relationship between reward and effort was finally abandoned.
The Lottery makes everyone complicit in a "marketisation" of social relations. There is a market in which entrepreneurs running or seeking to run the Lottery, and the good causes seeking grants from the proceeds, compete. The outcome of this competition, like that for "investors" in Lottery tickets, is perceived to depend on a combination of successful risk-taking and sheer luck. The man or woman in the street may feel concerned (though there is little evidence of this) when the company running the Lottery seems to make inordinate profits or when a deserving good cause fails to win a grant because another good cause has marketed itself more successfully. But they cannot complain, because they are players in the game. It is all about the chance of the market and the luck of the draw-a rhetoric so pervasive now that it excludes almost all others.