How's This For A Bit Of Conspiraloonary.

For a number of years there's been a conspiracy theory doing the rounds that the UK National Lottery is rigged. Supposedly this is why the sale of tickets stops so long before every draw and why Camelot is the only company that ever gets awarded the contract to run the lucrative game.

The theory follows that in the, up to, three hours between the last ticket being sold and the draw being made the numbers on the tickets that have been brought is analysed and the "winner" is chosen. In the case of online plays and people who play the same numbers week in and week out this analysis can not only identify the shop the "winning" ticket was brought from but the individual that purchased it. Once the "winning" combination of numbers has been identified the lottery balls that carry those numbers are coated in a thin magnetic film. During the draw this means that those balls are attracted to an electromagnet in the draw machine and the seven winning numbers are seen to be "randomly" selected live on TV.

The reasons why the National Lottery is supposed to be fixed are multiple but include; It provides a sly way to pay out large sums of money to people who have been deemed deserving of such a reward. It can be used as a way to create excitement and feelings of success in a local area by promising to inject large amounts of money into the local economy. It can create the sort of human interest, good news, stories that encourage people to continue playing the lottery and by extension pour money into the 2012 Olympics in what is essentially a tax on human stupidity.

Although the person who originally told me this story is the sort of person who would know about this sort of thing they're also the sort of person who would lie so I've always been a bit skeptical about the whole thing. That skepticism took a huge knock on Friday when two British ticket holders shared a £90million jackpot in the Euromillions draw, a pan-European Lottery administered in part by Camelot. This was one hell of a coincidence because earlier in the week the Czech Republic ratified the Lisbon Treaty. This prompted the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, to announce that Britain would drop any opposition to the Lisbon Treaty and go back on his promise to hold a referendum on the matter. Therefore it looks as if the Lottery win was a reward to Britain for being good little Europeans and encourage the British people to look more favourably on pan-European enterprises.

Of Course I'm not just saying that because I didn't buy one of the winning tickets!