Super Casinos

I don't what sort of a hellhole area you must have to live in to think that it will be improved by having a "super-casino" built there but this is the fate of Manchester.

If that wasn't bad enough, then finding out that the current government has still yet to decide what legislation they can come up with to make it even less enjoyable must be a worry. Culture Secretary ("culture" and "casino" hardly sit comfortably together except in the oddest of sentences) Tessa Jowell has said "Las Vegas is not coming to Great Britain... British casinos will be subject to new controls, which will be the strictest in the world."

So, whilst New Labour will expect to cash in on whatever revenue this place generates you can be sure that it will be a soulless place lest people contemplate a return visit at which point they will surely turn into some sort of deranged gambling addict which of course is what we must avoid.....or so the government rhetoric will have us believe.

Remember the Dome. Flush with 750 million quid they managed to try and canvass every do-gooders opinion about the what it should contain, and what was supposed to be celebration of the millenium and to highlight everything positive about Britain (and also, shock-horror, an enjoyable experience) ended up being a mish-mash of compromises, political correctness and pseudo-educational displays which the British public was smart enough to see for the hopeless scam that it was.

Quite how The (now even more hopelessly redundant) Dome didn't get the contract to house the "Super Casino" is surely a story that has yet to be told. The current custodians of The Dome must have lined every pocket in Whitehall and Westminster to get to the front of the queue to host it so will be mightily pissed off that they haven't. Expect another scandal similar to the current cash-for-peerages fiasco when they take their revenge on New Labour for failing to deliver the contract to them.

So don't expect to enjoy yourself - Gordon will see to that. It'll deliver a ton of minimum-wage jobs which will help no-one in what will be a pale shadow of anything you see in Las Vegas. Emasculated beyond comprehension by foolish legislation in order to placate local objections, people will walk in, stick a pound coin in a slot-machine, not win, get a lecture from the legion of obligatory, onsite counsellors expressing concern lest the hapless numpty who has stumbled in has his fiscal prudence addled by bright lights, he'll toddle off into the night, and wonder what all the fuss was about.

Having made his exit, the unimpressed punter will realise there was never any point in going there in the first place......which is why next year, he'll have two weeks in Vegas and get treated like an adult, human being, with free sandwiches and a bit of sunshine.

A few years on, the government will realise what a rickets they've made of it all and revoke the tranche of silly legislation they brought in, that was never enforced but they love to think up believing the majority of the population is somehow wilfully stupid with its money.