A lot at stake for the Sun with gambling tax

The Betting and Gaming Council – the influential lobbying group which represents Britain’s massive gambling industry – has this week been enthusiastically sharing an editorial from the Sun rubbishing plans floated by Gordon Brown to hike taxes on it in the forthcoming budget.

In the opinion piece, the Sun describes taxes on betting as “a disaster for hard-working voters”, that it would “clobber firms who employ tens of thousands of people” and that, apocalyptically, it would lead to “the road to national ruin” in a country in which an estimated 1.3 million adults are thought to be suffering from problem gambling.

The Betting and Gaming Council (chaired by Michael Dugher, a former special adviser to Brown) has been repeatedly promoting the piece on X, saying it was “great to see” and repeating that such a tax hike “risks the livelihoods of tens of thousands”.

Suggested Reading

The Murdochs and Maxwells: the haves and have-yachts

Rats in a Sack

But such a tax hike would, more importantly, hurt the coffers of the Sun. The newspaper’s website has a page dedicated to gambling, which is packed with articles containing ‘affiliate links’. Publisher News Group Newspapers also owns Sun Bingo and Sun Vegas, an online casino site.

And a News UK press release just last month said the Sun was “growing its revenue and client base within the sector, expanding the Paddy Power partnership in football for a third year running and securing the latest high-profile sponsorship deal with Unibet for Sun Originals”.

In other words, one firm which would be clobbered by taxes on betting would be the Sun which, with its sales in such freefall it long since stopped publishing them, is increasingly reliant on the gambling industry. Space, alas, prevented it from mentioning this.