It is potentially a mortal threat to racing which should concentrate minds

It is potentially a mortal threat to racing, which should concentrate minds both within the sport, and among those who depend on it.To date, the BHB has been sceptical about many of the bookmakers' ideas to increase non-racing, and therefore non-Levy, turnover. Everyone, it seemed then, could plan for the future with confidence.Instead, just a year after the launch of the Lottery, many betting shops are on the brink of closure, and the Levy Board is planning deep cuts in its expenditure. Without the National Lottery, both sides of the industry would be looking forward to a period of growth and prosperity, thanks to the five-year deal on Levy contributions, secured in 1994, which seemed to prove that the days of bickering were over. Yet as they try to do a deal, both racing and the bookmakers would do well to remember precisely why they are in this situation.There is, after all, a common enemy, which at present seems to be employing the principle of "divide and rule" to considerable effect.

"He has responded very positively to that principle and we now wish to see it implemented."Yet as the bookies point out, a cut in their deductions of less than one per cent is impractical. "You can't pass on fractions," Tom Kelly, of the Betting Office Licensees Association, said. "If we put the money into the marketplace to stimulate turnover, everyone will benefit.''You could almost believe that the Chancellor, with his somewhat mischievous sense of humour, could not resist stirring things up. The 1 March deadline for an agreement between the various parties, after which the concession could be lost, also adds spice.

This, they argue, would stimulate betting, and thus assist racing - horses and dogs - via the percentage of turnover handed on by the bookies to the sports they depend on.The British Horseracing Board, however, wants a portion of the reduction to pass directly to the Levy and feels that the Chancellor's words back it up. "We put the case for a duty reduction embracing both a reduction in the price of betting to the consumer and a transfer from duty to Levy," Tristram Ricketts, the BHB's chief executive, said yesterday. The bookmakers want to pass the cut on to punters (who will then, of course, pass most of it back again) by cutting deductions to nine per cent. And this is what happens when he's actually trying to give money away.To be fair to the parties involved, the Chancellor's one per cent, offered on the understanding that it must "be spread between the betting industry and horse and greyhound racing", puts them in an impossible position. To add to the confusion, he has also parachuted greyhound racing into no-man's land, eager for its own piece of the action.

Racing GREG WOOD The Chancellor devoted just 86 words of his Budget speech on Tuesday to the problems of the racing industry, but there was every indication yesterday that its factions will be arguing about them until Christmas and beyond. Outsiders might feel that it should not be difficult to split pounds 65m in two, or even three, ways and still keep everyone happy. In the twilight zone of racing politics, however, the first casualty of war is common sense.By ignoring calls from both racing administrators and the bookmakers for a cut in betting duty of two per cent or more, Kenneth Clarke has ensured that both sides of the industry are now returning to their trenches for a protracted battle over the one per cent he did relinquish. Such universal grannies and grandads were almost certainly much more recent - probably numbered in thousands of years rather than many tens of thousands - and there would have been plenty of them to dispute the honour.. father.The curious thing, though, is that Adam may have lived long after Eve. Since men are liable to father more children than women, we would probably not have to go so far back to find an Adam who populated the world as a comparable Eve.Mitochondrial Eve and African Adam may be uniquely the most recent people for which those properties can be claimed, but that is a long way from being the earliest common ancestors of all of us. And African Adam, identified by a computer analysis of the men- only Y-chromosome, is everyone's father's father's father's ...

Most of our genetic code is a scrambled mish-mash from both parents, but mitochondria travel down the female line So Eve is not just our great-great-great.. granny, she is our mother's mother's mother's.. mother The mother of all mothers, in fact. Everyone's mitochondrial DNA is precisely, give or take a random mutation or two, that of their mother. The Eve in question was identified by comparing the DNA of her mitochondria (which swarm inside our every cell to play an essential role in the process of respiration) with that of other women from various parts of the world. By hypothesising selective breeding, we can produce as many potential Adams and Eves as we want.Not African Adams and Mitochondrial Eves, however, for they are something special. And it gets worse. Suppose Shem and Ham now marry two daughters of a woman called Lilith and go on to populate the world. Then Eve and Lilith would both have been the common ancestor of all of us, with little to choose between them and no way to tell who was first. Then Noah could have been the great grandaddy of us all, without ever having known, biblically or otherwise, Eve.