Mandy’s wheels come off

Lords, eh? They know how much things are worth. Take Lord Taylor, yours for a cool hundred grand a year. Today evil overlord Mandelson himself announced a loan scheme for Britain’s – pinch of salt needed – ailing car manufacturing industries, amounting to £2.3bn of taxpayer’s money – having almost nothing to do with his recent trade trip to India and Jaguar being owned by Tata.

As with so many of Mandy’s headline grabbers, the announcement of such a scheme was tempered with a salient thought provoker:

Britain needs an economy with less financial engineering and more real engineering.

It would take a brave man (or banker) to disagree with that. Britain has, over the last quarter of a century – even longer when we consider the decline in coal and North Sea oil industries – moved from having a robust manufacturing sector to a pompous financial one.

A such,  currency has been wildly overvalued and the UK has been increasingly reliant on  products dreamed up by financiers as opposed to being rich in resources and primary produce. It’s simply not been legitimately rich.

Ever the pugnacious Scargill impersonator, Unite chief Derek Simpson delivered his take on Mandy’s Rover rescue:

There could be little left of the industry by the time it arrives. This package is too little but it is not yet too late. Ministers must leave behind the failed free markets philosophy once and for all and intervene decisively now.

I think that’s known as damning with faint praise.

It seems a little disingenuous for the government to be prepared to save an industry which accounts for around 20 per cent of all UK transport emissions and that they know full-well is in terminal decline.

The promise to lay “the foundations for its reinvestion for a low-carbon future” is, of course a Mandy sweetener; £2.3bn is laughably small beer for a fundamental shift in the industry’s ecological drive – excuse the pun.

Labour’s need for a car loan scheme is likely to be echoed in other manufacturing industries. But further intervention will only be patching up holes caused by a short-sighted fixation on financial service sectors and years of manufacturing neglect.

Too long has passed for such carbon-heavy industries for them to have a long-term future after this crisis, no matter how many loans the government throws their way.

Still, we could always ‘hire’ Mandelson to change carbon legislation.