UK “Super Casino” Plans Officially Canned

The long awaited “Super Casinos” destined for Manchester have officially been canned by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Religious leaders and similar conservative constituents launched a ferocious campaign against the construction of the behemoth gambling destinations and they have finally won.

Las Vegas executives had been making plans in conjunction with the British government to build Vegas-style resorts in the British Isles only to find out that all their planning was fruitless.

“If we’d had known the game was stacked against us, we wouldn’t have wasted jet fuel going over there,” stated one of the Sands Inc executives.

"We spent a lot of time with the folks there (in Britain), trying to figure out how to do a larger style of gaming," said William Weidner, Chief Operating Officer of Las Vegas Sands, at the Reuters Travel and Leisure Summit in Los Angeles. "That didn't work. Mr. Brown pretty well shut that down."

Originally, the plans for the British super casinos were centered solely on Manchester with other cities such as Blackpool as possible locales in the future.  What seemed to be a certain project quickly became bogged down in a barrage of legal maneuvers that saw support for the original Manchester site abruptly overturned in an unfortunate re-vote.

The 16 smaller casinos that will now likely be built are broken down according to the space which they have allocated for slot machines. The eight largest of the new 16 casinos will not be allowed to have any more than 150 machines and are currently targeted for Great Yarmouth, Hull, Leeds, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes, Newham, Solihull and Southampton. As for the other 8 casinos, they will each be allotted a grand total of 80 slots and will be located in Bath, Dumfries and Galloway, East Lindsey, Luton, Scarborough, Swansea, Torbay and Wolverhampton.

Manchester and Blackpool will both receive government payouts for basically getting shafted. The economic impact of reversing the decision to build casinos in these cities is immense. Manchester alone has claimed that as many as 3,000 new jobs would have been created by the new casino. A Liberal-Democrat party official denounced the official announcement stating, "Gordon Brown has single-handedly stopped the creation of 3,000 jobs and £265m of investment in east Manchester. He has sold Manchester out."

Las Vegas Sands COO William Weidner was recently quoted in a Reuters article that the new 16-site plans was "the worst of all worlds." Weidner characterized the newly planned casinos as "sub-optimal, lousy little casinos."

Suprisingly, no parties have hinted towards the social implications of building 16 small scale casinos spread out over the country as opposed to building a resort. The clientele at the small casinos will certainly be a less desirable one, since people will go there solely to gamble instead of vacation. Instead of attracting families, it will tend to draw an amalgamation of card sharks, drug dealers and various other lowlifes. The idea of going to a casino with a mere 80 slot machines doesn’t make sense for your average citizen who is just looking to let off steam for a weekend.

For whatever moral reasons the government may have claimed for reversing the “super casino” plans will come back to haunt them after the reality of their mistake sets in over the next few years.