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- Labour is “offensively caricaturing” working-class people by saying they do not want a greyhound racing ban in England, the Green party MP Hannah Spencer has said.
The sport has traditionally been associated with working-class culture and has historically been popular in so-called red wall areas, which Labour insiders suggest is part of the reason why there are no plans for England to follow bans announced last month in Scotland and Wales.
The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, said in parliament on Thursday that the gambling industry “brings joy to a lot of people”. She said: “The industry as a whole brings positive benefits to the United Kingdom.”
Spencer, who won the Gorton and Denton byelection in February and has four rescue greyhounds, said: “Lisa Nandy just continuously offends people by saying that working-class people don’t care about dogs or each other. It is a caricature and it is very offensive.”
She added: “I get offended when I hear the argument made that it is working class. Working-class people are fed up with gambling companies being able to wreak havoc in people’s lives.”
Sources close to Nandy rejected the notion that she believed working-class people did not care about dogs or other working-class people. Nandy recently said: “We have absolutely no plans whatsoever to ban greyhound racing. We appreciate the joy that it brings to many, many people in our country and the economic contribution that it makes.”
Lisa Nandy Photograph: Gary Calton/The Guardian
The sport can cause injury and death to dogs, and many survivors are passed to animal charities after their racing days are done. These charities then have the difficult task of rehoming the large, often anxious dogs, which are not used to life in a family home.
Between 2018 and 2023, 2,700 greyhounds died and more than 26,500 injuries to greyhounds were recorded.
Spencer’s greyhounds are why she got into politics. She campaigned to close the Belle Vue racetrack near where she lived in Manchester, where one of her dogs, Olive, had raced.
“When I got her, she was really broken,” Spencer said. “I rehomed a greyhound called Judy who is 11 and for around a decade she was kept in a kennel and just used for breeding. My first greyhound, Graham, was terrified of everything outside because he’d been kept in a shed and had never really left. He never got over his anxiety despite my best efforts over many years. There were many things which terrified him.”
Labour has close ties to the gambling industry, taking hundreds of thousands of pound in donations during the general election campaign. Senior figures have been invited to glitzy events held by betting lobbyists.
Spencer said: “That is what opened my eyes to Labour, how lobbied and biased they are. Labour MPs will frequently accept really expensive hospitality packages from gambling companies. Why would they go for a jolly and go and see a concert at Wembley paid for by the misery of gambling addicts?”
The Green party leader, Zack Polanski, was recently accused in the Sun of “extreme madness” after a tweet from was unearthed in which he suggested he wanted horse racing banned. But Spencer thinks there should be a conversation about banning horse racing, particularly after the deaths of two horses at this year’s Grand National.
She said: “A conversation needs to be had about horse racing. We all saw those awful pictures of a horse that had been raced to death to make money for gambling companies. That conversation is coming. Those conversations are shifting. People are telling me they don’t think horse racing is acceptable either.”
Matt Zarb-Cousin, a co-founder of Gamban, an app that helps people with gambling addictions, said: “The gambling lobby in Westminster has had successive governments believing they somehow speak for the working class while their sector exploits and extracts from it. To make the assumption ordinary working people somehow don’t care about the welfare of dogs is a form of class prejudice.”
Mark Moisley, the commercial director of the Greyhound Board of Great Britain, said: “Greyhound racing is enshrined in British culture and contributes £164m a year to the economy, employs 5,400 people, and remains one of the top 10 spectator sports in the UK – and our priority is to ensure this continues, with the welfare of greyhounds at the heart of this.”
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