Heads you lose, Tails I win...

I don't know if you've ever been to Blackpool, but it's the most depressing place I have ever been. Its the stench that does it - a bouquet of a century of stale chip fat, mixed with fresh Bacardi Breezer chunder, stale sweat and knock-off CKOne. As you come off the M55 it hits you in the gut like a Uruguayan cat curry.

To look at, the place is even worse. Row after row of delapidated boarding houses with sticky carpets and aggressive staff who make Basil Fawlty seem accommodating. The famed "Blackpool illuminations" sum up the town perfectly - the most impressive thing about the place is that it's wired up to the national grid. The Blackpool Madame Tussauds is straight out of The League of Gentleman - random heads on random bodies mean that Bill Clinton is five foot nothing and Chairman Mao looks like he'd take out Arnold Schwarzenegger in a fair fight. And given the half-melted appearance of most of the waxworks, he looks like he's already tried.

Yes, Blackpool is without a doubt the most depressing place I've ever been. And I've been to Detroit.

So the news today that the place has lost out in the race to win Britain's first supercasino couldn't be more fitting. Having planned for over five years on winning the licence, I can only imagine the depression that has gripped the town this afternoon.

Nowhere needed this more than Blackpool. Losing 2% of its returning visitors every year, the area has no industry and no major employer other than the tourist trade. A poll of Blackpool residents over the weekend showed 98% in favour of the development. Plans had been drawn up some years in advance and had been thought through to the smallest detail.

And yet Manchester has won through.

Why?

Let's imagine that Blackpool had won and look ten years into the future. The casino is built and the employment and regeneration benefits have come to pass as predicted. Would Labour Ministers look at the new Blackpool and fell justified in the face of all the criticism they faced for its gambling policy?

No. The regeneration of Blackpool through gaming would only have updated what existed already. A cheap and cheerful, slightly seedy weekend resort in easy reach of Scotland and the North of England. A working class resort. Not beautiful, but a bloody good laugh.

All in all, the opposite of what Labour wants from its gambling policy.

Blackpool was doomed from the start. Labour were never going to trust the working class with that level of politically sensitive investment. They couldn't be trusted not to replace Blackpool with Blackpool 2.0 - the same cheeky postcards, strip joints and happy hours, but successful and internationally recognised.

Which is what did for Blackpool. Even if successful, as long as it retained its working class identity, it would be too easily the subject of Daily Mail sneers, too "chav", too "Jade Goody". A fate that couldn't be allowed to befall Labour's flagship casino project.

The decision to place the casino in Manchester also removes the possibility of a true evaluation of the regenerative potential of mass-gambling. Manchester has been regenerating since the mid-90s, through the repopulation of the city centre by the middle class. Ten years from now, who will be able to separate the effects of a new casino in East Manchester from the Sports City development down the road?

It would be a brave soul to predict a middle class influx into Blackpool, even with a Vegas-style casino. For those whose professional reputations relied upon the success of the casino project, a working class casino resort would have been unpalateable - even distasteful.

No, the argument went, better to choose Manchester, a major metropolis where the regenerative benefits are open to argument and fudge, where the donkeys and hen parties are lost in the post-industrial melting of a major city, and where no one class could dominate.

Blackpool was just too uncertain a bet.