Well, Aditya, There’s One Answer To This, But You Might Not Like It…

Aditya Chakrabortty on the awful threat to civilisation posed by …. gambling machines:

Who should bear the blame for the destruction of one man and his family? Abbas, surely, but not only him.

Yes, Aditya, only him. Who else?

After all, when he first arrived from Turkey, he was the archetypal good boy …

Wait, what?

Things changed when he was introduced to what the industry calls fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBT), and what nearly everyone else refers to as the "crack cocaine of gambling".

Ah. I see now, he’s just a poor innocent unable to cope with First World temptations, is he?

In my talk with Abbas, his son Yusuf has been translating some of the trickier bits. At the end, I ask how the 14-year-old feels about what his father has said. Sat next to his bear of a dad, he looks very small. "How do I explain? Sad and angry. All that money is my family's future gone. My parents divorced, and why? Because of a machine."

Well, we can’t have little Yusufs everywhere upset, can we?

So prevent Third World immigration now!

Do it for the children…