TWO-and-a-half cheers for the geniuses who have apparently put the brake on the demise of the motor industry – for the time being, anyway.

The ailing dinosaur that self-mutates annually at tinsel palaces in Geneva, Paris and Shanghai has been thrown a convenient lifeline to consume, thrill and maim.

The ‘cash for bangers’ scheme has seen car sales rise for the first time in more than a year and apparently accounted for one in five new cars sold in July.

‘Scrappage’ is little more than government-sponsored assisted suicide for tin boxes over ten years old in order to provide a market for updated clones and keep the mineral-munchers, steel plate presses and petrol-heads in business.

While the credit-crunch has stemmed the lust for gas-guzzlers, let’s not assume for one minute that the planet has suddenly gone green and elected voluntarily to turn its back on the self-indulgent sloth of couch-potato mobility. No, consumers still want them; they just can’t afford them.

Enter the government-sponsored greed fairy. Detroit started it with built-in obsolescence, but now European manufacturers have responded with a gleeful vengeance in order to shift their fields of mothballed models before the wire worm sets in.

By offering ‘great deals’, they convert the taxpayers’ contributions into profit margins by top-slicing list prices and adding a fuel ‘efficiency’ enticement to bait the hook. Frankly, in a traffic jam, centimetres-per-litre is purely academic.

It’s not just the sound of the word ‘scrappage’ that grates like a non-synchronised gear-box. Dealers are reporting that motoring heritage is being jettisoned by the skip-ful as the lure of a cheap new far eastern tea-caddy entices those who have not been able to afford a new car for a long time to sentence rare examples of a generation of sturdy runabouts from the 1970s and 80s – when we actually had a motor industry – to be culled and dismembered, releasing all the incidental toxicity of their manufacture.

Whether they are past their rot-by date or not, all queue to be crushed on demand in return for £2,000 part-exchange and baked metallic fragility, in the name of jump-starting industrial perpetual motion and lining the pockets of shroud-waving moguls.
So what’s next? In order to boost the infirm construction industry, will we be invited to demolish our houses after 20 years? Or to burn all our clothes at the end of each fashion season to ensure that the rag-trade continues to deliver riches?

What’s with this obsession to discard everything that’s tried and tested just to ring in the new? (Don’t let me get going on the subject of ditching London’s iconic Routemaster buses or the saga of the West Park ducks!)

We’ve also become passive victims of the ‘sell-by’ consumer code adopted by supermarkets worldwide. They, of course, depend on fast and total stock clearances, so on the grounds of exaggerated health margins we are terrorised into dumping freezerfuls of impulse-bought and over-advertised purchases in landfill, before there is nutritional degradation or hazard.

Frankly, we would not be here if our predecessors had not used their own common sense over consumption. What’s wrong with a bent carrot or a stringy bean anyway?

The general labour market has experienced its own ‘scrappage’ for some time, although it’s not been called that. Ask Age Concern about the non-mandatory but normally imposed retirement age in the UK.

The media has been in the vanguard of the throwaway talent culture: past 50 for females, 60 for those of the broken-voice gender. Because of TV’s exposure, the issue has provided a veritable circus of flouncing hissy fits by superannuated newsreaders – the more talent-deluded, the more vociferous – apparently in denial that professionals grow old. That’s not ageism, it’s a fact of living. How many 60-year-old gymnasts are still performing in public?

One recent example to hit the headlines does, however, appear less supportable, when experience is shown to count for nothing and a lifelong professional choreographer and talent judge is summarily ousted for a replacement with assets more seductive to close-focus lens exposure than any professional credentials.

And there is an unwarranted element of cruelty involved. Look at the way the media lampooned political figures like sir Alec Douglas Home and latterly Sir ‘Ming’ Campbell – both outstanding statesmen and honourable national heavyweights, simply because they exhibited an ‘elderly’ appearance and could be caricatured as geriatrics.

It may be a newspaper tradition, but why do we need to know the age of each and everyone reported in the media? A 41-year-old competitor ascends the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square in the name of art. Does that indicate superior athleticism or unexpected staying power? And what ‘celeb’ appeal is enhanced by learning that a
28-year-old international footballer is snapped with his 23-year-old girlfriend?

So, when after 35 years of an eventful professional life, I park my still reliably functioning 20-year-old motor-car in its 36-year-old garage, may I be forgiven for musing on a potential spine-chiller? It goes like this: as the world’s population increases and the planet loses its ability to sustain the impact of runaway numbers and the reckless destruction of its bounty, it won’t be long before some bright spark comes forward with a recommended ‘end-by’ date for those who have been there and done it all.

Now hang-on, that’s nightmare scenario stuff, where no right-thinking person should wish to tread.

Fear not: at the moment, time is on our side. With all these pension ‘black holes’ to fill, there’s no such thing as retirement. Who would dare mention ‘scrappage’ to a ‘twilight generation’ so gainfully occupied?