Bingo!

The gambling industry has managed a remarkable trick. It has taken one of the most extractive, least productive activities in the country and wrapped it in soft colours, friendly jingles and a pretend sense of community. The bingo apps are the worst of the lot. They promise warmth and companionship while quietly funnelling billions out of households that can least afford it. It is community theatre designed by accountants.

You see the adverts every day. A group of smiling women having a laugh over their phones, as if tapping a screen together is the modern equivalent of a night at the hall. It is not. It is remote gambling dressed up as friendship. It is loneliness exploited as a business model. Every lost pound drifts offshore while the smiling actors tell you it is all harmless fun.

This is happening in a country where veterans sit on waiting lists for mental health treatment. Where pensioners ration heating because the choice is warmth or food. Where food banks run on donations that would not keep a bingo operator in biscuits. The imbalance is obscene. The bingo apps hoover up money at a rate that would transform the budgets of every major social charity in Britain.

Take just a fraction of the gambling spend and put it somewhere useful. A billion pounds diverted from online slots and bingo would double the resources for winter fuel support. Three billion would all but eliminate rough sleeping if spent properly. A few hundred million would revolutionise veterans mental health care. These are not abstract numbers. They are the difference between warm rooms and cold ones, between therapy and crisis, between a veteran being supported and a veteran being forgotten.

Yet the gambling industry gets to pretend it is part of the entertainment sector. It is not. It is a wealth extraction machine that presents itself as a social good. The apps mimic comfort while doing the opposite. They promise community while eroding the actual communities they claim to celebrate. And all the while the industry insists that the problem is personal responsibility, as if behavioural addiction were a lifestyle choice and not the predictable outcome of products designed to keep people spinning and swiping.

The cruelty of it is how deliberately banal it all looks. No flashing neon. No casinos. No high stakes. Just pastel colours and chat rooms. The deception is the point. People will notice a casino taking their money. They will not notice a chatty bingo app quietly draining the bank over weeks and months.

The really bitter part is that Britain has no shortage of places where this money could be put to work for the common good. Veterans. Pensioners. Homeless outreach. Youth services. Debt advice. Local clubs that stitch communities together. The things that make a society feel stable. Instead, we hand billions to an industry that produces nothing but addiction and shareholder returns.

If even ten percent of gambling spend went to social causes, Britain would look like a different country within a year. But that will not happen while the gambling giants are allowed to sell themselves as cheerful companions rather than commercial predators.

Every bingo advert should come with a simple disclaimer: this is money that could have warmed a home, saved a veteran, fed a family or kept a community alive. Instead it will vanish into a balance sheet in Gibraltar.

The irony is that those who are addicted to gambling are those most likely to end up homeless.  

That is the real game being played. And the house always wins.