Should MPs be banned from betting?

A senior Conservative has been accused of placing an £8,000 bet that he would lose his Westminster seat.

Philip Davies, who is defending a 6,242-vote majority in Shipley, West Yorkshire, at the general election, told The Sun that the sum involved was "nobody's business", that he "fully expected to lose" the seat and that he had done nothing illegal.

A string of MPs are being investigated by the Gambling Commission and there are growing calls for the rules to be tightened or for MPs to be banned from betting completely. 

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What did the commentators say?

Concern over gambling on politics has been around since betting shops were legalised in the 1960s, said Politics Home. From then bookmaker William Hill worried that "it could become an evil if sensational reports of the odds were published" and "it could sway public opinion and make people vote according to their stake instead of according to their conviction".

Insider betting, which is what the Conservatives currently being investigated by the Gambling Commission are accused of, is already illegal. But there have now been calls for MPs to be banned from betting entirely.

Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory party leader and deputy chair of the all-parliamentary group on gambling-related harm, said MPs shouldn't bet on politics, because politics is "what we do" and "betting on it shows a disregard for the seriousness" of it. Tory MP Tobias Ellwood told BBC Radio 4’s "Today" that we should "prevent any current politician or party professional from placing any bets in the future".

Asked by Times Radio whether politicians should "just be banned" from placing bets, Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, replied: "Yeah, quite possibly, and I think we do need to have a debate about it."

This suggestion "would have looked absurd two weeks ago and is still absurd now", said Henry Hill on Conservative Home. "Any comparison with sport is spurious" as "there is no evidence that politicians are deliberately trying to lose races to win bets", and there is "no even theoretical misalignment of incentives if they bet on themselves to win". So any new regulation would "just be a press-management strategy", designed to "make this story go away by assuring the newspapers that something has been done". 

The debate has "ballooned into an unhelpful and unnecessary war on politicians betting altogether", said William Atkinson in The Spectator, with "confected" media outrage "whipped up" against a "harmless habit". "Ill-tempered moralism" is "never a good position from which to legislate, regulate, or investigate", so "those getting on their high horses" about political betting "should be careful not to crucify a long-standing and inoffensive bit of fun" in a "media witch-hunt".

Speaking to the Financial Times, Anthony Pickles, assistant professor in social anthropology at the University of Birmingham, said it would be very difficult to define any ban's limits. "Should unpaid political advisers be barred from political gambling? What about newspaper columnists?" he asked.

What next?

Five Conservatives are being investigated by the Gambling Commission, the industry regulator, for placing election bets, but "reports suggest the number of politicians involved is much higher", said the London Evening Standard.

Rishi Sunak said "the integrity" of that investigation "should be respected", but "what I can tell you is, if anyone is found to have broken the rules, not only should they face the full consequences of the law, I will make sure that they are booted out of the Conservative Party".

A Labour candidate has also been suspended by the party after betting against himself, with the Gambling Commission also launching an investigation into him. The outcome of the various investigations will go a long way to determining whether a full ban will be imposed.