Clause 7 - Casino
Gambling Bill
2:30 pm
Mr Tony Banks (West Ham, Labour)
I have known the Minister for many years—''since 'e were a lad''. When I was head of research at the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, he was a young shop steward who had just joined the national committee of the union. Let me show how old I am: I knew the Minister's father for many years before I had the pleasure of knowing his son.
I will not use the Minister's precise Sheffield words at the end of this morning's sitting, but he more or less suggested that I did not know what the Bill was all about, which was rather unfair, as I was on the scrutiny Committee. He said that amendments on numbers and locations could be considered later in the Bill. I would therefore appreciate his telling us into which clauses they could be incorporated.
The obvious thing for the Minister to do would be to withdraw clause 7 and produce a new clause that is more specific. Given that there was no specification as to numbers when the Bill came into Committee, I do not see where numbers could be specified in the clause, but I am sure that the Minister's officials can come up with something. We would appreciate an indication of his thinking, especially on a new clause.
In the original Bill, there was no cap on the number of casinos; we were told that there would be between 20 and 40 super-casinos, regional resorts, destinations or whatever they are called; the names seem to be interchangeable. The number eight came up and lots of questions were asked about why that number had been chosen.
Resuming my position as the former head of research of the AUEW, I did some research at lunchtime; indeed, I may have discovered where eight came from: officials and Ministers have taken the scientific approach, because, as we all know, eight is the atomic number of oxygen; it is the second magic number in physics; it is considered a lucky number in Chinese because it sounds like the word ''prosper''—pnew, I believe is the right pronunciation. Eight babies delivered in one birth are called octuplets; the first surviving set of eight babies, the Louis-Chukwu octuplets, were born in 1998, so when the new clause is drafted, perhaps it will be called the Louis-Chukwu clause.
If the Minister's officials took a religious approach, in Buddhism, the eightfold path is the way to spiritual progress—