Betting, Gaming and Lotteries

The first word that springs to mind is ““astonishment””. It must be almost unprecedented for a Secretary of State to come to the House and admit that there has been a climbdown in the other place, having given the Opposition absolutely no prior notification of what she intends to do in the debate. We learned that she wrote to a number of her party’s Back Benchers to try to buy them off, but did not share with us the critical change in policy that she just articulated. It is absolutely astonishing.