Uncle Dray's Electoral Follies, Part 2. Another free webinar

The 18th century was famous for corruption. So how much has changed?

Here is part of what is going on in this Hogarth picture.

Images of bribery abound ... in the foreground a shower of gold flows from the Treasury into the wheelbarrow of 'PUNCH' the candidate for 'GUZZLEDOWN'.

Hogarth is suggesting that the Whigs, the party of power, were using taxpayer's money to fund election treats and other bribes.

Sound vaguely familiar? In those days there was a dreadful scandal about the way most people had no votes. Now we have one where Labour have fiddled the Electoral boundaries so much that they will get far more seats than they deserve.

As far as I can make out the person who will come out best is the one who does the best impression of the Great Bliar. If it is Clegg, he will be able to institute the electoral system which has served Italy so well. Brilliant.

Enough of this carping. This morning I looked at the guff my three candidates in Chelsea and Fulham stuck through my letterbox, and decided that much can be learned from them, including a chief reason why the Lib-Dem party is doing so well.

So I shall shortly stage another of my webinars and see what lessons we can draw from these messages. The last was the most popular I have ever run, so keep an eye open.

Introducing new, miracle “Super Nanny” marketing

Sorry. I only put in that ludicrous heading because nowadays everything on the damn web is miraculous and mind-blowing - so I thought I’d join the hustlers.

Frankly this is not miraculous OR mind-blowing. It’s actually very simple, but it is to do with Super Nanny, and most marketers seem utterly ignorant about what I'm talking about.

By the way, do you know what Super Nanny is? It’s this reality TV show where Jo Frost, a comely buxom wench visits homes with impossible kids and clueless parents who are going crazy, and sorts things out with a bit of commonsense. It’s now being shown in 47 countries.

Well, I was watching her on Sunday (what a fascinating life I lead) and I noticed what she said to this poor woman at the end of her tether with the sort of loathsome brat who embarrasses parents in supermarkets

Don’t tower over the baby, get down to his level and speak as an equal

Explain why you want him to do what you want him to do

Don’t give in to him all the time by giving him rewards he hasn’t earned

Explain exactly what you want him to do

Tell him what the reward will be for good behaviour.

It is perfectly clear to me that Jo Frost knows a damn sight more about how to persuade than at least 8O% of all marketers.

This is especially true of politicians, who routinely talk down to us, promise rewards we haven't earned (and can't afford)and make no attempt to link what we do to what we get, nor even to suggest that we will have to do quite a lot.

The first one who actually tells the truth might be pleasantly surprised. We certainly would be.

I think maybe Nanny Frost should put them over her dimpled knees and give them a good spanking.

Calm down you lot.

Yes, it's true folks. They really ARE a bunch of wankers

You've long suspected it. I've long suspected it. The custodians of righteousness are a bunch of tossers.

According to a report by the Associated Press, “Senior staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were being paid to police the financial system, an agency watchdog says.”

One accountant was even blocked 16,000 times from accessing banned sites, the report said, as the results of a series of probes conducted during the financial crisis began to surface yesterday.

Seventeen of the employees were “at a senior level,” said the AP report, some earning salaries over $220,000 per year. ABC News revealed that several of these tossers are still at it.

I am irresistibly reminded of the lines from Samuel Butler's Hudibras, the hypocritical puritan who "compounds for sins he is inclined to by damning those he has no mind to".

You just can't beat a stupid government if you want big profits

Here, a miraculous recovery is explained in The Daily Reckoning.

"When it converted into a bank holding company back in 2008, Goldman became eligible to borrow cheap money from the Fed's discount window. Morgan Stanley did the same thing. As a result, Goldman, Morgan Stanley et al. may borrow billions of dollars from the Federal Reserve and use the proceeds to purchase higher-yielding government securities of longer duration.

In other words, Goldman may borrow from the government at 0.75%, then loan the money back to the government at 3% or 4%. All in a day's "trading." Not surprisingly, all the major financial firms have been reporting blockbuster profits. Yesterday, for example, Morgan Stanley wowed the Street by nearly doubling its expected earnings result. Bond trading provided most of the juice, as Morgan's fixed-income revenue more than doubled from the prior year's first quarter.

Prior to Morgan Stanley's results, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and, yes, Goldman Sachs, had all reported record quarterly revenue from fixed-income trading. On the surface, these monster profits would seem like good news. But this silver cloud contains a very dark lining: without the Fed's low-cost financing, fixed-income profits will be much harder to come by."

A world policed by half-wits

As you can imagine, nobody is keener on the protection of birds than I am.

But some friends we can really do without, as I was reminded when I read the following by that great scourge of buffoons, Richard Ingrams, in The Independent

A few years ago, a Liverpool man, Steven Harper, was prosecuted for selling a stuffed owl on the internet auction site eBay. As the proud possessor of a stuffed owl, once a popular ornament in Victorian times, I experienced a moment of panic. Could I too be prosecuted? Or would that happen only if I tried to sell the owl?

Mr Harper, it turned out, was lucky to get away with a conditional discharge, while a spokesman for Merseyside police, keen to uphold the rights of dead stuffed owls, warned that ‘the legislation is in place to protect endangered species whether an animal is alive or dead’.

Or even, it seems, if it never existed in the first place - if another case reported this week is anything to go by. A Northumberland auctioneer, Mr Jim Railton, was not as lucky as Mr Harper. He was prosecuted and fined £1,000 for putting a collection of 100-year-old birds' eggs (many of them broken) up for sale. In addition he must pay a “victim's surcharge” of £15, though who the victim is or was has not been made clear.

Who is behind these farcical prosecutions? I suspect the hand of the militant Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the same organisation that has helped to fill the sky over my house with menacing red kites. It may well be time for the Queen to consider whether such an organisation as the RSPB should continue to be allowed to use the prefix “royal”.

What I wonder is to what degree the national crime rate is directly related to the deplorable stupidity of the police, and the fact that prosecuting people for inane reasons is a damn sight easier than catching drug-dealers - and makes the statistics look slightly less disastrous.

On balance, though, it is clear that if you have an educational system in ruins you are going to produce a generation that cannot think.