As anyone who has endured a domestic holiday knows, tourism in this country is stuck in a time warp somewhere between rationing and decimalisation. Run by graduates of the Basil Fawlty school of hotel management, the services on offer are so out of date they are almost worthy of heritage protection.

So any attempts to modernise the trade should not be casually dismissed. That said, the decision by Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary, to liberalise the gaming laws is hardly cause to cancel your fortnight on the Med. As a result of the new legislation, we are told, Blackpool will be transformed into the "Las Vegas of the north". The beleaguered tourist industry is rather fond of this kind of talk. When it isn't busy mocking up olde tea shoppes, the tourist trade tends to display its cluelessness about modern Britain by repackaging it as a version of somewhere abroad.

The Devon coast, for example, goes by the name of the English Riviera; Edinburgh is sometimes called the Athens of the north; and, still more imaginatively, Birmingham likes to be known as the Venice of the north - well, just as Venice is said to be drowning, so the visitor to Brum's concrete city centre is guaranteed to experience a sinking feeling.

In the case of Blackpool, the model it wants to emulate is itself based on somewhere else. Leaving aside its kitsch recreations of Paris and ancient Egypt, Las Vegas was originally conceived as an American Monte Carlo. But as Tom Wolfe once noted: "For the grand debut of Monte Carlo as a resort in 1879, the architect Charles Garnier designed an opera house for the Place du Casino; and Sarah Bernhardt read a symbolic poem. For the debut of Las Vegas as a resort in 1946, Bugsy Siegel hired Abbott and Costello." The suspicion must be that when Blackpool opens the UK's first resort casino in a couple of years, the attractions on offer, in any broad sense, will make Abbott and Costello seem like opera and poetry.

Marc Etches, the managing director of Leisure Parcs, which owns half of Blackpool's tourist sites, speaks of a much grander and more ambitious vision. He mentions "new standards of economic regeneration" stemming from the new casino business. "The town is declining as a tourist resort," he says, "but is also suffering some gross social problems. I don't know of anything that is as powerful as gaming to reverse that."

Yet Las Vegas, which until September 11 had enjoyed more than a decade of extraordinary financial success, continues to suffer some of the worst social problems in the United States, and tops the crime and murder league. And that's the rub with tourism as an industry. It's always concerned with attractions, rather than how to make a place attractive. That's why British tourism has been so susceptible. The idea is that if you get the image right, the reality doesn't matter. It's also an idea that New Labour has been far too eager to embrace; there's a conviction in Downing Street that if you can sort out the image, the reality can take care of itself.

And in a limited way it does. When New Labour was all excited about rebranding Britain a few years ago, it became intoxicated by the so-called Cool Britannia phenomenon. At the centre of the fuss was the supposedly newly swinging London. To be sure, London had changed. There were better restaurants and better bars and more disposable income. But a lot of the change was superficial, the sort that looks good from the distance of another country. And so the tourists came.

Thus the London Tourist Board thought it had the perfect riposte when the Lonely Planet guide to London recently described the capital as overpriced, dirty, pigeon-infested, with "horrendous" service, ludicrous licensing laws, "slow, unreliable" transport and violent road rage. The visitor numbers have gone up from 17 million to 31 million in a decade, said the tourist board, therefore the tourists must like it.

But one of the differences between being a tourist and a local is the ability to distinguish reality from image. The reality of London is that it is a dirty, badly run city - just as Blackpool's reality is a town locked in a bygone era. And it will take more than the spinning of politicians or roulette wheels to change them.

Salman's forgotten verses

It is touching to see that Salman Rushdie, that most itinerant of novelists, finally seems to have found somewhere he can call home. He had a terrible time in Britain, where the state made a profit out of him while he was in hiding, he says, and the journalists were simply horrid. Now resident in New York, Rushdie has taken to admonishing critics of American foreign policy and recently posed for a magazine draped in the Stars and Stripes.

"Anybody who has visited Britain," he lamented, "will have been struck, even shocked, by the depth of anti-American feeling among large segments of the population, as well as the news media." He went on: "Sadly, cheap slogans and ad hominem sneers have long passed for reasoned argument in the British papers."

I think I know what he's talking about. Comments such as these: "American aggression and the nuclear danger are closely linked"; or, "Because what the US action means - it cannot mean anything else - is that America has decided to destroy the idea of Palestine by the use of force." Or cheap slogans such as "humpty dumpty language" to describe American political speak. Or ad hominem sneers such as "[The American madness] is, it seems to me, rooted partly in the sexuality of the American male (Mr Stallone, in the Rambo posters, carries a metal phallus that makes Dirty Harry's old Magnum look positively weeny)."

I could go on. These crude anti-Americanisms were all produced by the same member of the news media. His name, of course, is Salman Rushdie. He was writing after the American attack on Libya in 1986 and, perhaps more significantly, before the Iranian attack on Rushdie in 1989.

Yet if his sympathy for Islamic states, secular or otherwise, was not so strong following the fatwa, his animosity towards America remained solid.

"I have little to expect from the Bush administration," he said. "The Bush administration's reaction has been non-existent, worse than non-existent. All our efforts to get their help have met with a brick wall."

All the more impressive then that he has been able to put the past behind him. Let's hope America can do the same.

The long and short of sentencing

What with government wanting more prisoners to be released and more criminals to be imprisoned, these days it can be difficult to keep up with sentencing policy. For example, some people are confused as to why John Archibald, a bare-knuckle boxer, has left prison, having served just 17 months for raping a terminally ill woman in her nursing home. The explanation, of course, is quite simple: he didn't steal her mobile phone.

· Catherine Bennett is away