NEWS
4 ASIAN TRADER 2 MAY 2025
The National Lottery operator
Allwyn has significantly
expanded its partnership with
online home delivery platform
Snappy Shopper, with 172
independent National Lottery
retailers now selling Scratch-
cards online through the
platform.
The pioneering new
initiative has already generat-
ed an impressive £150,000+ in
sales for retailers.
This expansion follows a
highly successful initial
small-scale trial in summer
2024, which demonstrated
strong demand from custom-
ers seeking convenient access
to National Lottery Scratch-
cards.
Since then, retailers have
been continuing to sign up for
the ofer of home deliveries, as
well as being up to date with all
the necessary safeguarding
training on the National
Lottery Retail Training
Centre.
The initiative also aligns
with Allwyn’s wider eforts to
modernise The National
Lottery, and its growth
continues to demonstrate how
the retail channel is central to
the company’s vision to grow
The National Lottery responsi-
bly over the next decade.
Allwyn, Snappy Shopper expand
to over 170 local retailers
Reality bites
ver the past few weeks, reality – which has been
cowering in a corner getting abuse and mud slung
at it for far too long – is making a roaring comeback,
all fangs and claws.
The UK Supreme Court decision upholding the al-
ready-existing law that there are two sexes and not 500
genders will be giving HR departments across the country
sleepless nights as they realise all the policies that will now
have to be unwound, and all the signs on changing rooms
switched back to how they used to be. And many lawyers
whose clients were harassed and fired for simply observing
the much-ignored law of the land will be rubbing their
hands together in anticipation of fat fees and financial
settlements.
President Trump is also discovering that the other
fellow has a say in how things go, and can shoot back,
especially when you confront all the other fellows at the
same time with your demands, while acting like Ernest
Hemingway at his drunken and boorish worst. How the
ensuing disruption to world trade and economics will
impact the UK in general and the c-channel specifically will
soon be discovered, but there is no need for despair – solu-
tions are like water and always find a way. Indeed, there
were certainly many downsides to the recently deceased
globalism that has held us in its thrall for the past four
decades. Our slogan after all is “live locally”, and it looks as
if we’ll certainly be having a lot more opportunity to do
that.
The government, too, found itself being savaged by
reality, and was forced to re-open Scunthorpe steelworks,
in order that the UK can at least make something. The
Chinese owners – globalism, again – had wanted to close
down the plant so the CCP could completely corner the
market in another vital strategic area, but Starmer and Co.
were finally made to see that perhaps it is not wise to be
dependent on the tender mercies of foreign dictators – who
knew?
The scales only dropped from government eyes (and not
just Labour eyes – this has been a decades-long cross-party
process) after they realised that Uncle Sam could no longer
be depended on to tuck the democracies in at night, so that
at least is something MAGA and Trump might be thanked
for over the long term.
Everything, all the old certainties, have suddenly been
thrown up in the air, and the old world has indeed ended;
we await to see what the new one might be like – and there
is certainly cause for optimism. Perhaps, though, not for
the Great Dictators, Putin and Xi. Putin faces bankruptcy
as the global slump kills the oil price he depends on for his
war, leaving him ultimately at the mercy of his serfs – and
the same goes for Xi, whose slave-workers will now be
mostly unemployed and angry. They both might soon be
dangling upside-down from lamp-posts as their people give
them a taste of reality sandwich, too. Oh, brave new world,
that has such people in it!
The inadequate number of new
recruits hired to enforce the
disposable vapes ban along with
insufcient funding and lack of
awareness will lead to a “new
era of criminal enterprise” in
the UK, MPs and campaigners
have warned, citing crime levels
seen in Australia.
Only 80 apprentice Trading
Standards ofcers have been
employed while £10m has
been allocated to police a
booming black-market
economy, far less that what
was demanded by convenience
store owners.
Last year, ACS had called on
the Government to provide
Trading Standards in England
with an additional “£140m
over the next five years” to fund
400 enforcement ofcers.
Since 2020, three illegal
vapes have been seized every
minute, says ACS. By 2023, the
number of illegal devices
seized by Trading Standards
increased 19-fold, with 4.18
million illegal vapes seized dur-
ing the last three years.
Latest National Trading
Standards figures from
November reveal authorities
confiscated 1.2 million illegal
vapes in 2023-2024, marking a
59% increase from the
previous year.
Conservative MP and
member of the all-party
parliamentary group for
responsible vaping Jack
Rankin said, “Underworld
operators will move quickly to
usher in a new era of criminal
enterprise in vaping products.”
“This always ends in
violence, and in Australia we
have seen firebomb attacks by
gangs on retail businesses that
have refused to sell their
black-market products.”
UK unprepared for gang rule after disposables ban
‘Australia-like’ vape
crimewave inbound