I'm impressed Baboonery, are you aiming to misquote everyone on this forum before you are finished? You're hilarious!!

I am giving you gambling figures such as 'we lose nine-and-a-half billion pounds every year, a figure which has doubled in just four years', and 'most of Britain's bookies are concentrated in the poorest neighbourhoods, like inner-city Hackney which has 95 shops'.
You are coming back with 'the number of betting shops have nearly halved' - from an unspecified point in the past! Well done, you've sent me down in flames!!! And you aren't choosing spurious facts or statistics to support your argument?! HAHAahaHHAaHAHaHAhAhahaAHahahAAHAA!!!

Please get a grip. There is a reality of problem debt and gambling addiction, and bookmakers cash in on it. Most people are obviously not rampant gamblers, but I don't see the benefit to our area of more bookmaking establishments.

I'm not misquoting you, I'm satirising you, because your flimsy arguments are worthy of little else.

Are you claiming your three-in-four gamble every week stat is accurate? Because it isn't. Even the man you cited as an expert to back up that stat says it isn't. Would you like to withdraw it? Or are you going to do a King Canute act?

Are you claiming that there are now more bookies than ever before in your precious 'society'? Because there really, really aren't. There is one more in FH than there used to be. One. I bet (ha!) that at a point in the not-too-distant past that there were two or even more: some FH lifer might like to confirm. There are 95 bookies in Hackney. I'd be AMAZED if this is a historic high. Bookies have closed left, right and centre in the last 20 years as the industry has consolidated and as the lottery has slashed their receipts. It may be easier than ever before to open one on a regulatory level, but that doesn't mean the money's there to sustain it.

And if your grasp of common business sense is so tenuous that you can't spot a difference between a new company opening a site in the market and the same company opening a second one, then there's little hope for you, and you have no place lecturing those who choose of their own free will to spend their money in whatever way they choose, and calling them stupid.

By the way, most of the increase in gambling turnover in the last ten years has come from city traders engaging in spread betting. This is also the type of gambling engaged in most frequently by problem gamblers.

Bookies are subject to supply and demand just like anyone else. Too many chasing money and some will close, as has happened throughout the country in the last decade. The fact that one more opens up doesn't create demand.