feeding in £200, "a score at a time".

Selling cocaine in 0.8g wraps, James, a dealer, says he turns over about £5,500 of drugs – of which half is profit.

It just adds to the layer after layer of deceit in society which is bad for the psyche and is why society is the way it is.

Everything in the open is better all round for the majority of people.

Legalise all plant based drugs for a start.

It just adds to the layer after layer of deceit in society which is bad for the psyche and is why society is the way it is.

Unemployed Jake, 28, sells marijuana on the local streets and smokes some of the profit. He recoups any losses by gambling and taking out loans at payday lenders. He points out the brown shopping arcade in Salford lined with bookmakers and loan companies. "It's the only thriving industry around here," he says.

"There are six bookmakers, one more is on its way, and five loan shops. Even if you are on JSA you can borrow money from Speedy Cash. It's the main business around here.Take dole, turn it into weed, sell them, take your profits and put them into the machines. If you win, you are quids in. If you lose, you get cash from the money shops to cover your losses. Back to dole and buying drugs. There's nothing else around here to do."

It does make you wonder about local authorities too. In their eagerness to grant these licences, they are complicit in the fairly obvious social situations that follow. Whilst simultaneously taxing 'out' any other viable businesses that may have once existed in our poor, old town centres.

Rotten-to-the-fucking-core. The lot of 'em. Still, keep voting eh?

Nick Boles says in letter that government is taking action to tackle attempts by councils to block spread of betting shops.

Ministers have privately assured Britain's biggest bookmaker that attempts by councils to block the spread of betting shops would be frustrated by the coalition's controversial planning changes, despite claiming in public that the measures were intended to revitalise high streets.

Earlier this year a director of Ladbrokes, the largest betting company in the UK, wrote to the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) to complain of the "unfortunate attitude" of some councils which regarded bookmakers as "unacceptable and inappropriate additions" to the high street.

In the letter, passed to the Guardian, Ladbrokes said that "some councils are now placing whatever obstacles they can in the way of our ability to obtain planning permission" for betting shops and attacked "alarming actions by unelected officials".

In response, the planning minister Nick Boles wrote back to Ladbrokes saying: "I do recognise that this can be a significant problem and we are taking action to tackle it." The letter cites new powers contained in a controversial "pro-growth" bill, which became law in summer.

However, in public the department claimed the changes were introduced to cut "red tape to make it easier to get redundant buildings in our town centres back into productive use and help increase footfall on high streets".

The new measures, introduced for a two-year period, allow shops to switch use to bookmakers without planning permission. Critics say this will simply fuel problem gambling and exacerbate crime – further blighting Britain's struggling town centres and removing any way for local residents to protest.

The Local Government Association warned the changes would result in high streets potentially "overrun with clusters of betting shops and payday loan companies" – a charge denied by the government.

However, Hilary Benn, Labour's shadow local government spokesman, who obtained the letters via a freedom of information request, said the correspondence revealed a wide gap between rhetoric and reality.

"David Cameron claimed that he would act to protect communities but these documents show that his ministers have been doing the opposite by making it more difficult for communities to stop the proliferation of betting shops and undermining the powers used by councils to force applicants for planning permission to explain the social impact of their changes."

On Friday, the Guardian revealed how criminals are using electronic gambling machines – known as fixed dodds betting terminals – to launder thousands of pounds worth of illegal profits.

Councils are increasingly concerned about the number of planning applications to open – often multiple – betting shops on high streets already "over-served" by betting shops. Only lLast week Liverpool became the first local authority in the UK to vote to ban high-speed, high-stakes gambling machines in bookmakers.

Currently, bookmakers are limited to four machines per shop. The machines are hugely lucrative, bringing in on average £900 a week in profits, so bookmakers have bypassed the restriction by opening more branches in high streets – "clustering" in poorer areas.

Ladbrokes cited the example of Manchester city council which it claimed had "taken to delaying applications by seeking an entirely unwarranted level of information". However Kevin Peel, a councillor in the city, said the government's letter "made a total mockery of the government's localism agenda".

He said: "The new measures have stopped the local community have any say in the kind of high street we want. I have 20 betting shops 15 minutes from my door. There's crime, underage gambling and police have raised the issue of money laundering. It's gone too far here."

The government denied the industry had influenced its reforms. A spokesman for the DCLG said the bill had been prepared three months before Ladbrokes contacted ministers.

Instead he said councils could apply to the government to restrict betting shops using "permitted development" powers – which the Local Government Association describes as "ineffective, inefficient and heavily bureaucratic, not least because they require a 12-month notice period before they can be used".

Ciaran O'Brien, Ladbrokes press director, said the company "does have concerns about a repeated negative narrative among certain local authorities around betting shops that is driven by a religious or moral agenda based on the misleading use of data".

A spokesman for the DCLG said, "The provisions in the growth and infrastructure bill were announced to parliament three months before the department received a letter from Ladbrokes. To suggest the government was somehow influenced by the betting industry is simply untrue."

Having read the whole article, you read about the circumstances that millions of people live in and it's just shocking. Unsurprising, but shocking. Yet you can have economic correspondents stand there on the BBC and say "you've never had it so good". It's laughable.

Bank of England governor Mark Carney says the UK recovery has "taken hold" and unemployment will fall sooner than it had forecast.

The comments came in the Bank's latest quarterly inflation report, which raised the forecast for UK economic growth this year and next.

Mr Carney has said the Bank will not consider raising interest rates until the jobless rate falls to 7% or below.

On Wednesday, the UK unemployment rate was reported at 7.6%, down from 7.8%.

The report said: "In the United Kingdom, recovery has finally taken hold. The economy is growing robustly as lifting uncertainty and thawing credit conditions start to unlock pent-up demand."

Mark Carney: "For the first time in a long time, you do not have to be an optimist to see the glass is half full".

why is that guy selling coke and "laundering money" but then worrying about if he has enough money next week... surely if you have enough money that you have to clean it you wouldn't be worried where your next meal is coming from.

]Maybe it's like Goodfellas, maybe he's sniffing the profits.

Putting 3k into a machine to get £500 makes great sense even for a drug dealer

entrangermercenary1 wrote: The few fruit machines we have here pay out 74%. £100 in £74 back out. The FOBT machines may well have an even higher percentage But, the machines wouldn't exist with the percentage you used there because no-one would use them.
If you are pushing a fair amount of anything illicit and needing to clean the cash then you have choices. All of which will cost you a percentage. Some of which may well be less risky than others. FOBT machines being extremely low risk no? These folk are probably in a more informed position than you or I no? They probably weigh it all up and make balanced choices no?