The future is already here and racing needs to fight to survive

It is a long time since horseracing dominated betting shops, shops dominated the betting market and gaming was the exclusive preserve of casinos. Most non-remote gaming now takes place in betting shops and accounts for over half their profits; more betting takes place online, where football is more important than racing, than in shops.

There has been a revolution and it is not over yet. As with all revolutions, there have been winners and losers. Racing has struggled to avoid being in the wrong camp.

The revolution could be said to have started in 1999 when Victor Chandler led the movement of bookmakers offshore to offer “tax-free” betting. It continued with the replacement of betting duty by a gross profits tax in 2001, the same year that the Budd Report called for the deregulation of gambling, a call accepted in the government’s 2002 'A Safe Bet for Success – Modernising Britain’s Gambling Laws', leading to the 2005 Gambling Act. Radical change was fuelled and accelerated by a concurrent digital revolution.