ABSTRACT
About 22 million people watched Britain's National Lottery draw on Saturday 19 November 1994, presented on primetime television by the famous television personality Noel Edmonds. This was the outcome of an intensive campaign from the 1970s onwards to offer a national lottery as an easy to offer a big prize form of gambling which would have a broader appeal than the pools and raise money for good causes. The Pool Promoters' Association (PPA) had fought against a national lottery, presenting its view to the Royal Commission on Gambling (1976–1978) that a national lottery would be kill off the pools. Ironically, the PPA, offered its own scheme to that Royal Commission, suggesting the pools industry was prepared to run the national lottery if it were to be introduced. Ultimately, John Major's Conservative government moved firmly towards creating The National Lottery ‘for good causes’ in the 1990s. The government was driven on by the prospect of higher tax returns, the lottery prospered and the pools industry declined rapidly – not in the three or four weeks that the pools' firms predicted but, nevertheless, dramatically at first followed by a slow decline as the pools merged into the various forms online gambling that prospered in the early twenty-first century.
