This reeks of a spin doctor.

Cynic!
It sounds like "giving the industry what they want" to me...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1216030/Calls-scrappage-scheme-extended-car-production-plummets-third.html

Why? We barely have a car industry to support anyway. The tax subsidy would be better use if they used it to support student grants or training.

It's both good for the environment and keeps thousands of Britons in jobs.

We don't need any more students! We've got them coming out of our backsides and very few of them will have jobs to go to. If this keeps the factory workers, salesmen, parts manufacturers and other peripheral workers in jobs, earning money, paying taxes and buying stuff, it's all good. We may not have any native car companies that you could consider mainstream, but we've got a lot of people who work in the industry, whether they work for the overseas brands that have factories in the UK, or the companies that make parts, such as Bosch etc.

I am not disputing the environmental benefit, but then the car industry is over crowded anyway and needs to shrink and this is not the way to achieve that. Germany had a much better reason for doing so, they had a car manufacturing industry work supporting. It would have been better to use this money to support our actual manufacturing industry.

Fine then why not a direct subsidy to the car parts industry who actually make something? I would prefer it going to jobs which are actually productive. Even zero VAT for manufacturing companies for a year. Training could be for anyone who needs on the job training. As for students I was thinking more along the lines of better grants for the lowest paid so no need to take out loans which the rich do not need anyway. No need to increase the numbers of students for jobs that do not exist.

Morrisons do “cash for bangers” too. They have a wide selection of varieties and flavours.

Me >>>-----> Coat >>>-----> Door

Yeah, or illegal immigrants and "working class" people dodging taxes >.<

This is a pretty stupid scheme - I forget where I read it, but someone will probably be able to find a link somewhere, that disputes the "buying a new car to help save the environment" argument. Consider all the energy and wastage that goes into producing a car, you're not going to do any good to the environment for many many years per car.

I say get Britain educated. University grants, no point. We have enough people at uni as it is (and this is coming from someone who is at uni, struggling to pay for anything as I don't qualify for any "grants" because my mum earns too much, even though I don't see a penny of it, and as i'm doing an MSc I don't get a loan!).

Spend the money on schools. Spend the money on the police force.

HMG shouldn't be spending any money at all. They've spent too much in the last decade as it is, and we're going to spend the next 2 decades paying for it.

As you say it is not that environmentally effective either.

I do not necessarily suggest that we increase the numbers of university students. All that happens we get a huge number of people who are over qualified for what jobs they can get. The numbers of jobs that actually need degrees is a lot less. When you have 50% of the population with degrees the employers will start to select only those with degrees from the best universities. The rest have wasted their money on a worthless degree.

I would rather only 30% get degrees which is much more in line with jobs that actually need degrees. Then give those from the poorest backgrounds a full maintenance grant like there used to be. No tuition fees either.

I do support extra funding for education to keep class sizes down.

Well the police get more than enough already, they can afford to run multimillion pound helicopters at £1500 per hour.