Well, Darling, I can’t say I’m overwhelmed. Encouraged by the success of the vehicle scrapping scheme in Germany and France, Darling has taken the plunge (after a lot of pushing from Peter Mandelson) and has just announced a £2,000 incentive for scrapping an old vehicle. This isn’t a great idea. And I don’t maintain this simply because my old clunker is only nine years old and therefore won’t be eligible for a two grand voucher off a new set of wheels.

Already there are likely lads asking if they buy an old banger for 50 quid, will they be able to trade it in against a brand new set of wheels? The answer is almost certain to be no. Not even the Treasury is that daft. No, really.

But why should the car industry be favoured over any other area of manufacturing? We don’t have a huge indigenous car industry here anymore. It’s a fiscal stimulus to get a bit more VAT in. Why not allow punters to trade in their old DFS sofa for some homemade organic hemp furniture? Surely the Hon. Kirstie Allsopp would approve.

The other industry that will be reaching for its tin hat is the scrap metal business. There is likely to be such a huge amount of old steel coming into the recycling market that all their margins will be shot to pieces. But I suppose the real disadvantage of this scheme is likely to be that all the profits from any increase in sales of new cars will go abroad. It’ll be the Germans of BMW and Mercedes and the Japanese owners of Toyota and Honda who get all the benefit. A little help may be directed towards the desperate and beleaguered Jaguar Land Rover, but any profit from that is going to India.

I defer to MT’s old friend and dotty entrepreneur Ling Valentine in this: ‘It makes no logical sense to crush a perfectly good, 10-year old car just as an excuse to buy a new one. It’s an environmental crime, based on greed. All the dealers and manufacturers can see are taxpayers’ pound notes up for grabs. Dealers and speculators are said to be buying old bangers and registering them in friends and family names simply to take advantage of a windfall. What will happen to the 70,000 used cars currently for sale at less then £2,000 in AutoTrader? This scheme stinks, and the effect it has had on freezing sales this year can be attributed to a greedy industry headed by desperate people. Very few genuine owners of 10-year old cars will trade in against a new car, it just doesn’t happen. These industry heads should resign for causing a self-inflicted sales-confidence catastrophe’. You tell ‘em, Ling.

In parallel with this is the government scheme to encourage the purchase of green i.e. electric cars. There is, however, a big problem with these vehicles as they are available at the moment. Never mind that they simply change the carbon spewing venue from the exhaust pipe to the power station. They are too small, too slow and too expensive. You can barely fit Noddy and Big Ears into a GWhiz, however much it looks like their set of wheels. Electric cars have environmentally very unfriendly batteries and when fully loaded with a family of 4 or 5, plus luggage, their juice supply is unlikely to get you further than the end of the street.

PS According to our colleagues over at Autocar, Darling actually wants manufacturers to stump up half of this £2k - and they're not very happy about it...

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