Give lottery players a real choice, not an opinion poll

As well as setting teeth on edge, that phrase "good causes" should have sounded a warning. The National Lottery could not, when it was set up, simply be about gambling, so some of the money had to be diverted into something everyone approved of. That could not be anything the Government ordinarily spent money on, because then it would have been seen as a stealth tax.

So it had to be "good causes", which turned out to mean public art and anything with the word community in it. That gave us a great deal of exciting local renovation and cultural innovation; but it also gave us the Millennium Dome, a lot of committees looking for things to spend money on and some controversial grants to small-p political campaigns.

Ministers have found out the hard way that the only causes on which it is safe to assume public consent are those on which the Government already spends taxpayers' money – schools and hospitals first, as Labour's conference slogan had it.

Now Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, is trying to head off the poor publicity with a half-baked solution to the basic flaws of the original scheme. They want Lotto players to vote on the kinds of charity to which they want their forced donations to go.

This is an opinion poll, not a real choice, and it is the kind of tangle in which a government-licensed monopoly is bound to become caught. (It is also worth noting that it cannot be healthy for government ministers to feel they have to step in to reverse the declining sales of a commercial venture.) The better solution would be to allow a number of lotteries to compete for business – then the purchasers of tickets could choose by the more effective method of deciding with whom to spend their money.

Any lottery would, of course, have to be scrutinised by a government regulator, because of the danger of fraud. It may be that stiff tax should be levied on turnover – money an operator could choose to divert to approved causes.

But when the state becomes involved in allocating large sums of captive money to the fiction of non-political goodness, then, 13,999,999 times out of 14 million, trouble will ensue.