Iain MacWhirter: Glasgow needn't worry too much about missing out on Britain's first supercasino: another will be along in a minute. In fact, another seven will be along in about as much time as it takes to get addicted to online gambling.

Glasgow needn't worry too much about missing out on Britain's first supercasino: another will be along in a minute. In fact, another seven will be along in about as much time as it takes to get addicted to online gambling.

The contest for Britain's first supercasino was a battering ram to break down resistance to the concept of mega gambling. After Manchester, the rest of the country will get theirs, on the grounds that the unsuccessful venues, such as Blackpool, Glasgow and London Greenwich, demand parity.

There is, we are told, no need for further legislation, only a vote in parliament. The government wants to place supercasinos, with their 1250 unlimited-jackpot machines, in every one of Britain's regions. Beacons of regeneration, icons of "classless" leisure, monuments to the Blair age.

Look no further for the Prime Minister's legacy: he will live on in the wrecked lives of gambling addicts across the nation, and in the impoverishment of the poor and the hopeless who are most drawn to these asylums of exploitation.

According to research at Glasgow University, people living within 50 miles of a casino have double the risk of becoming a gambling addict. Single mothers are particularly prone to online gambling.

Which is presumably why the government wants to take away lone-parent benefits. Well, we can't have these useless people, idling their days away raising children when they could be working productively in - well, one of the thousands of jobs generated by the new supercasinos.

And the other 16 smaller casinos announced by the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, yesterday. What perfect symmetry. They can work in the "gaming" industry by day, only to lose their shirts online by night. And if times get tough, there will also be opportunities in the "escort" and "personal service" industries which supercasinos will bring in their wake.

No, you couldn't make it up. But does Labour ever wonder what kind of message it is sending to people with these crass juxtapositions? The party is supposed to be a master of public relations, a svengali of spin, but in the week following the gay adoption row, we are now presented with a government that wants to turn us all into gamblers and stop parents raising their own children.

And as for Manchester, which has won this dubious prize - well, I wonder how long it will be cheering. Does it really need the tat, crime and sleaze? This post-industrial city has been earning a justified reputation as a model for the arts and culture-led regeneration. It is now being used to massage the image of gambling - by having a supercasino located firmly in the culture belt.

Blackpool, which thought it was going to get the supercasino, will intensify its lobbying, as will Greenwich, which needs one to fill the useless Millennium Dome. Glasgow council will also redouble its efforts, allowing the government to claim that there is a nationwide demand for more and bigger gambling joints. Ministers say the intense competition has justified the whole programme.

For the government sees casinos as a convenient means of generating "painless" revenues. Painless, that is, except to the tens of thousands who will be damaged by addiction or repossession. It follows the success of the National Lottery, which turned us into a nation of punters.

Britain already has 117 casinos, and we spent £50bn on gambling last year - that's £800 a head. Gambling has increased sevenfold in five years, and one-quarter of the cash goes on online. Britain is already turning into a kind of floating Las Vegas, Europe's offshore haven of gambling.

While countries such as France and even America have banned online gambling, Britain wants more of it. The minister with responsibility for gambling, Richard Caborn, told a gathering of companies such as 888.com in Gibraltar last year that he wanted Britain to become "a world leader in the field of online gambling".

The onshore gambling houses are even more lucrative to the Exchequer, which is why the government is so keen on casinos. The culture secretary has fallen for the line that gambling is "a popular leisure activity of the working classes", like theme parks and kiss-me-quick hats.

The toffs have their race-horsing, so why deny the poor their flutter? "There's a whiff of snobbery in some of the opposition to the new casinos," as Jowell put it in 2004 when the original proposal for 40 regional supercasinos was unveiled.

In America, this drive to insinuate gambling into the very fibre of popular culture is well advanced. It is a £550bn industry there, taking in more revenue than movies, recorded music, spectator sports and theme parks combined.

Gambling is no longer dominated by companies such as the one-time Las Vegas Sands Hotel, but media corporations such as MGM Grand. Its boss, J Terrence Lanni, who is an adviser to the Bush administration on "gaming", told Gambling Magazine that in the next five years he expects the mega-corporations to use their economic leverage to buy out the major theme parks, film and television studios.

British television stations are trying to beat him to it. Already we are seeing a proliferation of television gaming channels, using cynical devices to part people from their cash. In evidence to a Commons select committee recently, it emerged that the chances of getting through on one of the phone-in gaming shows was 8000 to 1. Yet people are kept on hold on premium-rate phone lines, allowing unscrupulous channels - such as, er, ITV - to rake in millions while ignorant punters run up hundreds of pounds in phone bills.

It's a scandal. And the government response? It has decided to allow gambling to be advertised on mainstream TV. It beggars belief. Whose side is it on?

There is no demand for this massive expansion in gambling among the voters, who, according to ICM, are 70% opposed to supercasinos. So who does want them? Well, a clue might be found in the fact that American gambling interests have spent £100m, according to Bloomberg, on promoting casinos. It appears to have paid off handsomely.

Gambling lobbyists are not only lavishly funded, they are highly litigious, as I discovered to my cost two years ago, when an unguarded remark on a daytime political programme led to a law suit for defamation.

It's hard not to conclude that the government itself has become an extension of the multi-billion-pound gambling industry. I know that sounds a little paranoid, but what else are we to conclude? Nothing better illustrates the moral bankruptcy of New Labour.

It seems to want to give as many reasons as possible for people not to vote for it in the May elections. As if Iraq and cash for honours weren't enough, here we have government of the left promoting this evil and insidious form of human exploitation. Well, if it isn't careful, Labour could lose the entire pot.

Read Iain Macwhirter also in the Sunday Herald.