Dominic Lawson: If we have to have a supercasino in this country, please put it in Blackpool

It is a mystery why it should be thought obvious to situate such a wealth-creating machine in London

Trevor Phillips was quivering with rage. "The New Millennium Experience Company has been given a billion pounds! For this! After one billion pounds, there can be no excuses! That should be your newspaper's front page headline! After a billion pounds, no excuses!"

It was the early hours of the morning of 1 January 2000, and we were both among those invited to the opening of the Millennium Dome - the experience Tony Blair had claimed would be "The most exciting thing to happen anywhere in the world in the year 2000 ... we will say to ourselves with pride: this is our Dome, Britain's Dome. And believe me, it will be the envy of the world."

The current chairman of the Campaign for Racial Equality was then a Labour candidate for London mayor. But he had not been among the select Blairite elite whisked that night straight into the Dome via a specially chartered Tube train. Like the rest of us, he had had to queue for four hours.

I like to think, however, that Trevor's rage was not just a reaction to the astonishing inefficiency of the organisers, but also to the shock of discovering that the project on which the Labour government had invested so much financial and political capital was tacky, portentous and dull.

Mr Blair's stock defence to all subsequent criticism was that no taxpayers' money had been spent on his vapid monument. No, it had all come from the National Lottery Fund. So it is fitting, I suppose, that the Dome is now intended to become the centre of a gigantic casino complex, where the sort of people who unwittingly funded the site in the first place can waste even more of their money.

And the conning of the general public continues. That, at least, is one interpretation of the way in which the new owners of the site, Anschutz Entertainment Group, persuaded the Department of Media Culture and Sport to place on its website what purported to be an endorsement by local religious groups of its plans for a "supercasino".

Following a furious memo from the Rev Malcolm Torry, the head of the Greenwich Peninsula Chaplaincy, this has now been withdrawn by AEG. At the same time, the company apologised, using the phrases now inevitable whenever anyone in public life is caught out doing something underhand.

AEG first of all said that it had made "a genuine mistake." What does this mean, exactly? Does it mean that it was a real mistake?" Well, we knew that. I think it's meant to create the impression that the perpetrator didn't realise that it was wrong when he did it, and subliminally, that he is a "genuine" sort of person. Then, in its new submission on the DCMS website, AEG claims that "our original information was supplied by us in good faith."

I presume that this is not meant to be satirical, nor the fact that AEG goes on to quote from various scriptures about the evils of gambling, including the Koran ("Oh you who believe! Games of chance are an infamy of Satan's handiwork!) and the Hindu (" Oh Man! Do not gamble!"). Unfortunately the document does not state the views of the American Evangelical Protestant Church, the sect to which AEG's owner, Philip Anschutz, adheres.

None of this really matters, however. It is just an example of the modern method of consultation, in which the maximum paperwork is generated to the minimum of purpose. No matter what the various faith groups in the Greenwich Peninsula have to say, it will play no part in the ultimate decision-making process - this is just designed to make them feel good. Doubtless the other contenders for the nation's first supercasino, such as Blackpool, Manchester and Glasgow, will have carried out the same process of "consultation."

It is now being said that the entire business is in fact a charade; that Mr Anschutz, in part because of his allegedly close relationship with John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, has a done deal. Why else, claim the Tories, would AEG have already begun the construction of the Dome casino? At the very least, it displays considerable chutzpah on the part of Mr Anschutz - although I suppose that is how people become billionaires in the first place.

It is a mystery to me why it should be thought obvious to situate such a wealth-creating machine as this in London. Obviously there are existing infrastructural advantages: London City Airport is on the Dome's doorstep, ready and running to handle millions of Europeans who can't find enough glitzy ways of losing money at home, and who want somewhere closer than Las Vegas to do it.

But London is already about to receive over £2.5bn of capital expenditure as a result of the staging of the Olympic Games in 2012 - and the Greenwich Peninsula will be one of the prime beneficiaries of that. According to Oxford Economic Forecasting, which recently carried out some fascinating research for the City of London, "We expect London to enjoy the fastest growth of employment in all UK regions... London remains a magnet for inward investment to the UK, attracting 37 per cent of all inward investment projects in 2004/5, compared with only 5 per cent in the mid 1990s."

Most interestingly of all, Oxford Economics points out that the average public expenditure per head in Greater London is as high as it is in Scotland, and much greater than the national average. It is true that the tax revenues contributed by Londoners are more than double those handed over by Scottish residents, but these figures show that London has already been treated lavishly by Labour: hardly surprising when you consider how many parliamentary seats there are in the metropolis.

The country to which Philip Anschutz belongs is more puritan than ours, and sites its gambling centres in places such as Las Vegas and Reno - moral as well as actual deserts, far from the big cities. Our country is too small to adopt such a policy.

If we must have such a place, it really should be Blackpool. That has for long been a destination where Britons go for innocent - and not so innocent - fun. But the last time I went there, it seemed desperately in need of investment and all-round brightening up.

As for "our Dome, Britain's Dome": if we never hear about it again, it won't be too soon.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk