Yes.
I want to see, and I think that this may commend itself to the House, a cool look at just what the consequences are beyond the merely financial—you can scarcely use “merely” in terms of the numbers concerned. In Committee, I tried to remember a quote from John Maynard Keynes in 1936, when this type of trade was trivial when compared with today. He stated in his great book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money:
“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done”.
How pre-eminently true that is. The noble Lord, Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, made the bold but timeless statement when he was head of the FSA that a great deal—I am not sure that he did not say the majority—of what the City now does is socially useless, because, sadly, only a tiny proportion of these gaming trades has any commercial purpose whatever. They are pure gambling. It is not that they are buying forward raw supplies for some manufacturer to even out the ebb and flow of world prices in whatever commodity or mineral it is—nothing to do with it; it is pure, unalloyed gambling.