I should say in passing that I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Antoinette Sandbach) on her new clause 2, and with my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on new clause 7. I particularly agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) on amendment 29. He is absolutely right and he may or may not know that I faced exactly the same situation in Bradford as he did in Sutton Coldfield. The Minister has put a stop on the core strategy plan of Bradford Council, but I hope for a much more favourable outcome from those deliberations than my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield received. I assure my hon. Friend the Minister that I will feel equally aggrieved should the decision be as it was in Birmingham.
I want to speak about new clause 1, and in doing so, I should begin by referring people to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. The hon. Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones) made it clear once again that he is the biggest devotee in the House of Donald Trump. He quoted him, as he usually does, when he referred to fixed odds betting terminals as the “crack cocaine of gambling”. Anybody who knows anything about this subject knows that the term was first used by Donald Trump in the 1980s to refer to video keno games, which he saw as a threat to his casino businesses. Ever since he first used the phrase, any new form of gambling—in fact, every new form of gambling—has been referred to at various times as the “crack cocaine of gambling”. That has included casinos themselves at certain points and lottery scratchcards—name any form of gambling, and I can point to somebody who has called it the crack cocaine of gambling. So, of course, fixed odds betting terminals have been called the same—not because they are considered to be that, but just because the same old phrase is trotted out every time we have a new form of gambling.
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The hon. Gentleman talked about the massive public concern about these issues. I suspect, Mr Speaker, that if you were to go out on to the street and ask 1,000 people what their views of fixed odds betting terminals were, 999 would say, “What’s a fixed odds betting terminal?” In fact, when people in the House have been out knocking on doors in their constituencies at election time—those who do so—I wonder how many people have said to
them, “Do you know, the main thing that concerns me is FOBTs. My vote at the election will be determined by your policy on FOBTs.” I suspect nobody in the House can put their hand on their heart and say that that has ever been their experience. So the idea that this is a massive social concern for the vast majority of our constituents is a—