Maggie’s Den

Abstract

Chapter 3 shows the transformation that occurred, between 1968 and 1997, in lawmakers’ approaches to bingo and what it represented about the nation. Focusing especially on Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government (1979–90), it identifies three key changes. First, commercial bingo was significantly deregulated, and political debates were refocused on the need to bolster the industry, including by taxing non-commercial operators that were its alleged competitors. Second, political debates about gambling moved away from self-organized mutual aid towards charity. Third, there were increased references to commercial bingo within discussions of welfare and consumer responsibility, and as a result gambling became proof of individual fecklessness rather than national cultural and economic decline. In charting these changes, the chapter makes bingo reforms central to the state’s broader project of welfare state restructuring and better regulation in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, it emphasizes the state’s alliance with charitable actors to privilege non-participatory forms of gambling (especially lotteries) over gambling run by non-commercial members’ clubs. The chapter also identifies the key role of gender in gambling debates, showing that deregulation rested in significant part on claims that commercial bingo halls provided lonely old women with their only source of company.