The Newmarket Town Plate amateur race runs this weekend for the 355th time since it was founded by the Restoration “Merry Monarch” King Charles II. Open to any horse and rider certified fit enough to participate, it has been most years since 1666, and stands as emblem of how deep the horse racing tradition runs in this country.
Today, the sport is second only to football in terms of the enjoyment, employment and economic benefits it brings to our economy, making in excess of £1.4bn a year and bringing in over £4bn to the economy. But this sporting success story is, at least according to industry spokespeople, now under threat. Rachel Reeves proposes to raise the rate of taxation on horse racing bets, to bring these into line with other online gambling vehicles such as roulette. In response, for the first time in its history racing is going on strike: on 10 September, four scheduled fixtures will not race.
I’ll confess that when I first read this story, it seemed of a piece with all the other ways in which Starmer seems implacably at war with what’s left of England’s traditions and pastimes. His party has already set about taxing to extinction anything even faintly redolent of regional life, such as small farms and independent schools. Nor is fun any longer respectable: pubs and fast food restaurants quail under Starmer’s dour Fabian gaze. Horse-racing’s cocktail of royal heritage, rural life, and that most un-Fabian of working-class pastimes — gambling — surely makes it a logical target for the Starmerite commitment to grinding flat everything distinctive about our national culture.
But a closer look reveals that that despite Labour’s track record of malignantly anti-English cultural vandalism, it isn’t really culpable here. Indeed, the proposal now being pursued by Labour was, like many of Starmer’s greatest hits to date, originally the progeny of some iteration or other of the Tories. Rather, Labour is responding to a far deeper, more intractable and far-reaching enging of change: the internet. And the question for horse racing is one that faces us all, now: under that solvent force, how can anything based in the “real” world adapt and survive?
As attested by the still-visible ruins of the ancient Hippodrome in Istanbul, horse racing for entertainment and betting goes back a long way. But English racing was born alongside modern England, and developed in tandem with industrialisation. Newmarket held its first recorded race in 1622 and — after a Cromwell-shaped hiatus — saw the Restoration monarch, Charles II, sometimes riding his own horses at race meets. Not long afterward, Royal Ascot was founded under the patronage of Queen Anne, cementing the link between racing and Britain’s modernised constitutional monarchy.
Like Anne, Georgian England’s wealthy loved the sport — and the betting. The aristocratic Jockey Club was established in Pall Mall in the mid-18th century, for upper-crust fans of sports betting. Gradually acquiring racecourses across England, the Jockey Club would in time develop into the body governing English horse racing, before being relieved of that duty in the Nineties following charges of corruption.
If the emerging mercantile and landowning classes loved racing (and sometimes a whiff of corruption), so too did the new urban working class. Britain’s industrial revolution saw land enclosures and farming reform pushing peasant populations off the land. These departed either to manufacturing jobs in England’s swelling cities or overseas to the nation’s expanding colonial holdings — whence wealth flowed into the booming urban economies, driving demand across classes for new diversions.
Ascot Heath, long a horse racing destination, stands as both symbol of and solution to this changing social fabric: it was secured as a permanent racecourse in 1813 by one of the very Acts of Enclosure that displaced so many peasants into urban factory life. We might wonder if some such individuals, having fled rural England for slum life and shift work, were drawn to the races at least in part by the nostalgic spectacle of green racetrack and graceful horses, emblems of a world they’d left behind.
But the driving engine of the sport was always, for upper and working classes alike, the betting. As gambling fever gripped Georgian England, it had drastic negative social consequences for some of the rich. The noted dandy Beau Brummel, for example, who set the dress-code that still holds in modified form at Royal Ascot, was ruined by betting and had to flee England in shame and penury in 1816. Meanwhile, social reformers tutted at its deleterious impact on the masses, and thus as gambling increased, so too did the pace of regulation, mostly directed at the working classes.
The 17th century saw four separate ordinances restricting gaming and gambling, with nine further laws passed in the 18th. And as Britain’s industrial revolution and imperial expansion reached its zenith in the 19th century, the popularity of racing was broadened again by the same technological innovations that was, by degrees, emptying the countryside of peasants. The Telegraph flashed racing results all over the country, while railway travel enabled larger crowds to attend race meets. In turn, still further regulations were passed to control gambling and gaming: some 21 additional laws.
But no one wanted to ban the gambling altogether. It was too profitable, too popular — and especially in horse racing, too interwoven with the sport. What crystallised, then, was an institution that embodied the sensibility of high imperial Britain, blending snobbery and populism, conspicuous consumption and hard-nosed commerce, vice and glamour, chance and skill, industrialism and rural life — along with a degree of meritocracy also characteristic of industrial-era England’s fighting sensibility. At the last count (as in business or war), what matters in racing is victory — and there, performance ultimately matters more than pedigree.
We can perhaps pinpoint this era as bookended by royal racing fans: the Royal Ascot founder Queen Anne, and the late Queen Elizabeth II who, over decades as a racehorse owner, won every classic race in Britain except the Epsom Derby. But the two 20th century world wars began the long, slow collapse of imperial Britain. And, in their aftermath, broadcast media upended the delicate balance between gambling’s profits and social costs.
TV and radio turbocharged unregulated street betting even more radically than the telegraph, driving calls for an expansion of licensed betting shops. This finally resulted in the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act, which legalised bookmakers operating off-course. The result was a huge increase in gambling turnover — but also that bookies were no longer confined to racetracks, which significantly dented the betting profits accrued by the racing industry.
Industry outcry resulted in the 1961 Betting Levy Act. This introduced a statutory 10% levy on the profits of high-street bookies, to offset the loss of race-day revenue. This money was then handed to the Horserace Betting Levy Board to distribute “for the improvement of horseracing”. It was a classic bit of post-war managerialism, responding to a changing economic landscape by nationalising the affected industry and spawning a new Blob to control it. Since that Act, the HBLB’s principal remit has been distributing Levy money as race prizes: some £72 million annually, according to the body’s most recent business plan.
These sometimes staggeringly large prize pots (the Grand National’s purse totals £1 million) in turn attract wealthy owners and power a lucrative, cut-throat downstream industry. For a sense of the immense rewards accruing to winners, over her lifetime as a racehorse owner the late Queen alone racked up over £8 million in racing prizes. But this begs the further astronomical sums that change hands for prized horses, or even just the chance of breeding from one: the Grand National winner Flightline was sold for $1 million as a yearling but is predicted to earn over $50 million in stud fees over his lifetime. And for race-lovers not rich enough to own a whole horse, there’s always the syndicate: such a group plays a central role in Jilly Cooper’s 2010 steeplechase bonkbuster, Jump!
This all incentivises the effort, dedication and obsession that powers English racehorse culture at ground level, while employing some 85,000 people across the country. But since the turn of the century, things have changed again: now, online gambling has overtaken the high-street variety, creating new challenges for an industry long dependent on funnelling the profits of gambling back into the sport itself.
More recent rounds of legislation have sought to capture online betting revenue for the racing industry, and Reeves’s current proposal aims to streamline the resulting convoluted system. But the issue now being contested, between government and the racing industry, is more fundamental still: at issue is a qualitative difference between online-only forms of gambling, and those — such as racing — that rely on older, more elaborate real-world sports.
Should we care what happens to an industry that profits off hope, economic inequality, and sometimes addiction? No one can blame the industry for protesting a tax proposal that so directly menaces its historically specific funding infrastructure. Conversely, while there’s no disputing racing’s deep historic roots in English culture, I am probably the kind of bourgeois sourpuss who would have supported all 21 of the 19th century laws curbing gambling. As such, I struggle to muster much enthusiasm for defending what I suspect is at least sometimes an exploitative and seedy industry. And in an age of administrative bloat and a strained public purse, it’s not unreasonable for a government to seek more streamlined and fruitful approaches to taxation.
But on one metric at least horse racing deserves our wholehearted defence: it happens in the real world. The central issue it raises affects us all: the qualitative difference between forms of gambling that rely on older, more elaborate real-world sports, and online-only varieties that are simply lines of code on a server. We didn’t realise how much we would miss local journalism until it had already been destroyed by social media; should we shrug as real-world sports are treated as though indistinguishable from virtual competitors?
According to the BHA, Reeves’s proposed tax hike would result in a £330 million hit to the industry in the first five years, potentially threatening thousands of jobs. Perhaps we should just shrug, too, at this possible risk, to an industry that has always yoked glamour and excitement to addiction and bankruptcy. Perhaps racing is wealthy and unscrupulous enough to survive. But perhaps it wouldn’t be.
We cannot lose sight of what is distinctive about real-world institutions and offline cultures — even those with a seedy underbelly — when these face new digital challengers. You don’t need to be fit enough to race the Newmarket Town Plate to grasp the importance of horse-racing to England’s broader equestrian culture. And once degraded or destroyed, all that activity and the skills, practices, and institutions that support it would also disappear.
We should not be too casual about waving through the replacement of human, real-world cultures by virtual competitors. Unlike online roulette apps, more or less by definition a racehorse must (as the anons say) touch grass. On this issue, perhaps Labour’s bean-counters should too.
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Author: Mary Harrington
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