One thing that all but the most ardently statist apologist can agree is that the past ten years have been a disaster for civil liberties, as one human activity has been criminalised each and every day. However, they haven’t been unmitigated. OK, so more liberal drinking laws hardly make up for mandatory biometric ID cards and an explosion in tracking of us by CCTV cameras, but it’s something worth celebrating. It’s a step in the right direction, even if ten are being taken back at the same time.

Indicative of this contrarian policy stance is the Gambling Act 2005, which came into force at midnight last night. It consolidates statutory laws against gamblers, built up haphazardly since 1845, removes various limits on pay-outs (so-called ’super-casinos’ being the pin-up boys of the new system) and liberalises some of the most stringent regulations against advertising to be found in any industry. That’s the good part.

The bad part is the centralisation inherent to the Act. It outlaws gambling on small premises: supposedly in the name of protecting children, but actually for more the nefarious reason of overseeing and taxing gambling. Take-aways and minicab offices can no longer host the small pay-out fruit machines that made spending time waiting around in them tolerable. Moreover, even larger and more secure premises will be subjected to oversight from the new Gambling Commission.

The question is: why do we need a Gambling Commission at all? Gambling is simply a form of entertainment, to be engaged in freely at the cost of one’s own money. The moralising crusaders might as well ban football, which is far more addictive and costs far more money (although my experience on both counts may be biased by being a season ticket holder at the most attractive and expensive club in the world).

The Salvation Army decries the ‘normalisation’ of gambling, but, actually, the opposite is true, as it brings gambling under stricter and stricter control of the government. No human activity, as simple as gambling and engaged in by two consenting parties, should be regulated as near to eradication as gambling is (the state’s own National Lottery excluded, of course!). To bring normality would be a sweet relief from 162 years of criminalisation.

Sadly, we don’t have normality, and, as is the case with most reliefs under New Labour, this one is not so sweet. Internet gambling fled this country to be rid of over-regulation, yet the government insists that it can pile on more bureaucracy to solve the problem that some people may want different things to the Salvation Army. Each step forward under New Labour has been accompanied by ten backwards, and, sadly, despite the hysteria from the traditionalists, the same is true of the Gambling Act.