In ancient Athens, public officials were chosen by drawing lots, a ritual known as sortition. Elections were thought to favour aristocrats, whose wealth and eloquence lifted them to power; sortition was designed to nurture equality before the law (isonomia), based on equal freedom of speech (isegoria) (1).

This lottery reduced the potential for factionalism, corruption and superiority, put an end to continuous electioneering, and led to city resources being more fairly allocated. Over any one free Athenian man’s lifetime, there was a good chance he would be picked to serve his city. ‘The appointment of magistrates by lots is democratic, and the election of them oligarchical,’ Aristotle wrote. ‘One principle of liberty is for all to rule and be ruled in turn.’

In Britain today, people are also meant to feel that to play the National Lottery is to participate in the betterment of the country: ‘Every time you play, the UK wins,’ the official website reads. The goal of the draw is less egalitarian, however. Since it launched in 1994, the world’s first privately run state lottery has been operated by the Camelot Group, whose machines are named after Arthurian legend: Guinevere, Merlin, Excalibur — pointing to the myth of the sword in stone, with its promise that a prize is just within reach and that anyone can become king, if it is his destiny.

But now the license to run the National Lottery is up for renewal again, with a decision from the secretive Gambling Commission expected in March: Camelot’s challengers include the Italian operator Sisal (recently bought by gambling firm Flutter), the Czech-owned Sazka Group, and former tabloid owner and businessman Richard Desmond.

‘A National Lottery for good causes’

A 1698 law made private lotteries illegal in England unless they were authorised by statute (they were subsequently used by the state to raise money for wars, museums and bridges); small private lotteries were only legalised, in limited circumstances, three centuries later, in 1934. When the National Lottery was founded amid a moral outcry, led by Church of England bishops, at gambling deregulation, its promoters had to be careful in their presentation. Camelot is keen to distance its brand from the word ‘gambling’: a bet, rather than being sinful, irresponsible or indulgent, has been recast as a demonstration of community spirit. In playing the National Lottery, first imagined by Lord Victor Rothschild’s Royal Commission on Gambling in 1978 as ‘a National Lottery for good causes’ (2), Britons are encouraged to see themselves as not only hoping to get rich, but contributing to a social redistribution scheme.

Playing the Lottery means giving God a chance to intervene in our lives, rejecting the narcissistic idea that success is due solely to our own efforts — in short, accepting grace over merit Gabriel Zaid

John Major’s Conservative election manifesto in 1992 presented a model based on this idea, which would ‘enhance the life of our nation’, giving a proportion of winnings to charities, the arts, sports and heritage; to this list would later be added projects to celebrate the millennium.

Now the lottery distribution bodies split the draw money (3) between arts, sport and heritage (60%, ie 20% each) and charitable, health, education and environment ‘good causes’ (the National Lottery Community Fund, 40%) (4). Camelot publicises the good works these ‘good causes’ do on its website: discussions about mental health, athletes celebrating Mother’s Day, films winning awards, all enabled by its patronage.

In April 2020 the National Lottery announced it would direct £600m to Covid-19 relief, its ‘good causes’ organisations that had been affected by the pandemic. Half of this has gone to the Community Fund (5): for example, to food banks and organisations combating loneliness, stepping in to protect people who have fallen through the cracks of state provision.

A Scottish body that distributes meals to vulnerable people received £10,000, while the government doggedly resisted providing free meals for schoolchildren from deprived backgrounds. Money was also distributed to sports clubs, heritage sites and the Arts Council, which received £144m ‘to create an emergency response package to support individuals and organisations across the cultural sector’.

Voluntary over state provision

Since 1994, when 22 million people watched the first draw on television, the National Lottery has become a key part of a system that prefers volunteerism to state provision. ‘Since the Lottery began, 28% of the total value of grants awarded in England has been channelled into the 10% most deprived local authority areas,’ Camelot wrote in 2015 (6).

While Margaret Thatcher declined to pick up Rothschild’s proposal during her time in office, she did consider using the lottery to fund the National Health Service. When the idea was found to be illegal, Thatcher said she disapproved of gambling but not of the model: ‘I did not like a national health lottery because I did not think that the government should encourage more gambling, let alone link it to people’s health.’ Richard Desmond already runs the Health Lottery, a group of 12 local society lotteries that donate to medical charities, which has its roots in the failed NHS lottery.

In its original conception, the lottery was not meant to patch the holes in a threadbare welfare state. In 1995, when it was debated in the House of Commons, a minister admitted that ‘it was never part of the original thinking of the lottery that charities would be beneficiaries.’ Their presence on that list justified the creation of something else: a system of patronage for arts and heritage funding.

Rothschild had written that the lottery should ‘fill the gap created by the inevitable disappearance, in a society where the accumulation of private wealth has become much more difficult, of private support of worthy causes on a large scale’. Anxieties about how to maintain the houses of the aristocracy were exacerbated in the late 1970s by the government’s high-profile refusal to acquire Mentmore Towers when its owner, a relative of Rothschild’s, died, causing its collections to be sold to foreign buyers.

While Camelot’s marketing of the National Lottery has highlighted its charitable giving, bolstering its reputation as a pillar of UK community-building, 81% of people state that neither they nor a family member has benefited from a National Lottery-funded project (7). ‘Charitable, health, education and the environment’ spending amounts to only 40% of the roughly 25% of proceeds reserved for ‘good causes’, compared to a 20% chunk given to heritage. (One of the first grants awarded by the Heritage Memorial Fund’s went to Winston Churchill’s family for his letters, a very unpopular purchase.) In 2018 Camelot was reprimanded by MPs for allowing its profits to rise by 112% while its charitable contributions grew by only 2% (8).

Dismantling of the welfare state

Implicitly, the lottery is necessary because the state is not providing sufficiently in key areas that make a society worth living in, such as art. Many have argued that it was the generous welfare state of the 1960s that produced iconic art and music, a welfare state that is being steadily dismantled. As a Cabinet Office review of the Big Lottery Fund admitted, ‘It is hard to strictly define “additionality” [the principle that lottery funding shouldn’t be a substitute for money raised through taxation] in an environment where public sector investment is generally declining.’

In her book Steal as Much as You Can, Nathalie Olah traces the consequences of top-down taste-making (such as that of lottery distribution bodies) on cultural creation in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s: instead of The Clash or The Specials, there were rock stars throwing expensive cheese festivals, culture based on nostalgia, and an absence of the popular, working-class art of previous decades (9).

In these ways, the UK’s iteration of the lottery, adapted for an atomised society, couldn’t be more different to the Athenian system of sortition. Instead of bringing about more democracy, the National Lottery ensures that a small group of unaccountable people, the lottery distribution bodies, have funding and therefore power to allocate money. The lottery’s arrangement with the government is unusual: while good causes are chosen by the Great and the Good without government influence, it is protected as a monopoly.

On an individual level, the National Lottery’s redistribution seems to give money to members of the working class when they win; on a class level, it is the rich who obtain power through the participation of the poor. Lottery interest is most pronounced among ‘lower supervisory and technical households’ and least among ‘managerial/professional households’, participation decreasing as income rises.

Trustworthy figures are difficult to find, but Camelot claims that 70% of Britons play the National Lottery; it may well be less, but certainly it’s by far the most popular form of gambling in the country (10). Its roster of games has expanded over the years — from the pan-European EuroMillions to Thunderball, Set For Life and Online Instant Wins — and it claims to make more in UK sales than Pepsi, Purina, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Cadbury and Walkers combined. In 2017, 37% of players were over 60, 41% in the 50-59 bracket and only 3% aged 18-24 (11). Camelot made its highest digital sales, of £1.62bn, in the six pandemic months to 26 September 2020 — a 39% increase on the previous year. Despite the lockdown affecting small businesses that sell tickets at stands bearing the lottery’s iconic mascot, a pair of crossed fingers with wide eyes and a hopeful smile, total sales were still at their second highest ever (12).

A leisure activity

Sociologist Emma Casey’s studies of the lottery suggest it dovetails with the material demands of the lives of working-class women. Her interviewees play the lottery not as an ‘escape’, but as a leisure activity that fits into their demanding schedules, without separating them from their homes or families, and without forcing them to take risks with money. In the early 2000s, the average amount spent on a lottery draw was £2.66, compared to £8.50 at the bingo hall.

The Lottery was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was their delight, their folly, their intellectual stimulant George Orwell

A lottery ticket is seen as a moral, responsible investment, worth it even if the win is small — easy to budget and ‘consistent with the type of routine and managed behaviour that is frequently expected of women who are responsible for managing the household finances’. Interviewees contrast this moderate spend with the wastefulness of the middle class, for example the use of lottery funds to build the Millennium Dome and redevelop the Royal Opera House.

In its coverage of the lottery, the press plays a role in maintaining suspicion between social groups. The tabloids hawk xenophobic narratives, pointing out the ethnicities of lottery winners (a headline in The Sun read ‘National Wokkery’ when a man of Chinese descent won), appealing to the dark side of the lottery’s nationalism (‘Every time you play, the UK wins’). One working-class winner was painted in grotesque terms as the ‘Lotto Lout’ and ‘King of the Chavs’, titles that played on the subversion of class hierarchy.

A winner’s wealth is often compared to that of the royal family (headlines like ‘Richer than ER’). Indeed, in several other contexts the word ‘lottery’ stands in for society’s perceptions of how people get lucky in life — as it is when people wanting to immigrate to the US play the ‘green card lottery’, and parents pursuing good schools hope to win the ‘postcode lottery’.

Meanwhile, liberal intellectuals are uncomfortable with the lottery, sometimes characterising it as ‘a tax on stupidity’. (In its overwhelming popularity, its emotional pull and its particular conception of community, and in its rejection by a section of the professional class, the lottery resembles the royal family.) Writing for the London Review of Books (‘The Plot to Make Us Stupid’), David Runciman argued that ‘by introducing the Lottery the state is treating stupidity not as an evil but as a valuable commodity.’

The playwright Alan Bleasdale described his repulsion for what he saw as reckless desolation in The Guardian: ‘My instinctive moral horror of the Lottery is re-lived every Saturday in newsagents throughout the land as the worn-out, the elderly, the shabby and the desperate queue up in the hope of their only escape.’ Such discomfort has intellectual pedigree: in Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell had already painted a fictional lottery as yet another means for a government to dupe the public: ‘The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention ... It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant.’

Playing because it’s fun

Yet there are good reasons why people play the lottery: if the meritocracy we are told we live in is in fact a lottery anyway, why not buy a ticket? As Mexican essayist Gabriel Zaid writes, ‘Playing the lottery means trying to make a connection with divine providence, giving God a chance to intervene in our lives, rejecting the narcissistic idea that success is due solely to our own efforts — in short, accepting grace over merit’ (13). Something else gets lost in all the talk of ‘good causes’: in all its luck, fate and distraction, many people (24% of young ticket buyers) report playing the lottery because it is fun (14).

The same proportion attribute their habit to their family also playing, and scientists agree that environment contributes to gambling addiction, as it does to other public health issues, like alcoholism or smoking. The National Lottery’s scratchcards and their online equivalents take the brand into more overtly exploitative territory as gratification or loss is instant, with no obligatory wait for a draw, providing a gateway to addiction for more vulnerable gamblers. Lower-income households use scratchcards significantly more than affluent ones, and these are more likely to lead to problem gambling, and the associated issues of homelessness, unemployment, family issues and suicide. For scale, a recent report estimated the cost of gambling-related harms to the public purse was £1.27bn a year (15). On the advice that younger gamblers have a greater chance of becoming addicted, the government has raised the age for entering the lottery from 16 to 18.

Among these social contrasts, the worldview painted by Camelot is appealingly flat. The lottery creates the illusion that people play on an equal footing — of a community without varying needs. Built into the jackpot is another assumption: that the best luck one can have is to become suddenly incredibly, disproportionally rich. Instead of addressing the needs of a class, the lottery offers uplift for individuals and their families, as well as more leisure time. An individual with more time and money is unlikely to start any collective political project. A communal activity is rewarded in the language and coin of individualism, ironically separating one person from the group.

Indeed, pure luck, whether the jackpot or the lightning strike, is isolating. In Mario Benedetti’s novel The Truce, a man is tricked by colleagues into believing he has won the lottery, and is fired for his explosive reaction, leaving him with neither job nor fortune. In Chekhov’s short story The Lottery Ticket, a husband and wife who imagine they have won resent each other, wanting to spend the money alone. The positive connotations of the lottery are reversed in Shirley Jackson’s infamous short story The Lottery, in which each year a small community has a tradition of drawing slips of paper to decide which member will be stoned to death. ‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ screams the unlucky winner left holding a ballot with a black spot on it, as the story ends. ‘And then they were upon her.’