As an employee of Bet365 and native resident of Stoke-on-Trent, I was naturally attracted to your article on Denise Coates and her gambling empire (The ultimate gambler? How Denise Coates became Britain’s richest woman, 2 October). The success of the company presents an ethical quandary: do the taxes, the charity, the healthy salaries and employee benefits balance out the massive harm that gambling causes, both nationally and specifically in deprived areas such as Stoke-on-Trent?
The section on the gambling harms clinic, demonstrating evocatively the damage that online gambling can do, made me pause. Bet365 offers yearly pay rises and performance-dependent bonuses, a daily lunch allowance, working from home arrangements and so on. In a city like Stoke, this is a virtual goldmine. But as employees, are we benefiting from the exploitation and suffering of those vulnerable to addiction? Are gambling addicts paying our wages? This is a question I have wrestled with.
Stoke has little opportunity for employment outside of warehouse and retail work for the majority of its residents. Bet365 then, to an extent, has a captive workforce. The cynical part of me wonders if Coates is cognisant of this, that Bet365’s apparent pride in the local area is a ruse hiding a business calculation.
Coates is evidently an intelligent, business-savvy and driven woman. One could say that it is a shame that such a brilliant mind has been dedicated to an industry that can have such deleterious outcomes, that a company that has such pride in where it comes from can ultimately harm a city that it celebrates itself for helping.
Name and address supplied
• I read your excellent analysis of Denise Coates’s Bet365 operation with anguish. Some years ago, I worked in London as the night manager at an East End men’s hostel that had become home to many gambling addicts. Former army officers, businessmen, bankers and other professional gamblers, oil rig workers, tradesmen – all united by destitution, desperation and despair. Men whose livelihoods were long gone, their families gone, homes gone and, worst of all, their self-esteem destroyed.
Among the alcoholics and drug addicts who also shared the hostel, the gambling addicts were the saddest to work with, because they always remained remorseful and fully aware of the exploitation that they had fallen victim to and the havoc that they had wreaked on those around them.
Coates and her ilk should hang their heads in shame. Gambling should be globally restricted for the serious health danger that it is, and all advertising banned. We will never be able to obliterate addiction – a human condition – but surely we should not be zealously promoting such a severely hazardous activity?
David Lewis
Scarborough, North Yorkshire
• People want to gamble, so if you drive it underground it will once again become the domain of organised crime. There is, however, no question that serious reform of gambling legislation is long overdue. One way to accomplish this is by making the profits of gambling organisations (including the national lottery) subject to a tax of 50%-70%, all of which should go to a charitable trust and be used for the betterment of society – part of which could include the rehabilitation of those with an addiction. I don’t believe this would be too difficult to achieve, but sadly I realise it will never happen.
Alan Barker
South Shields, Tyne and Wear
• Surely I can’t be the only person who sees the parallels between Bet365 and Purdue Pharma, the maker and seller of addictive opiates, right down to the support for the arts and the galleries in Denise Coates’ name. Her aversion to interviews means we don’t know how she would justify pushing her product to the already and soon-to-be addicted, but Purdue’s attitude that its product fulfils a need and it’s only a few weak people predisposed to addiction who have a problem springs to mind.
Rosemary Fox
Cardiff
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
