The much-vaunted car scrappage scheme, in which clapped-out old bangers are traded for new cars, hangs in the balance today after leading manufacturers Ford and Honda belatedly realised that the government was actually serious about expecting them to contribute half of the £2000 scrappage payments.
"The original request was for a contribution of £1000 from the industry," said a white-faced Honda spokesman. "We were fully expecting the dealers to absorb that sum, as part of the usual discount that self-deluding motorists love to think they are getting by a bit of haggling over the completely theoretical price on the windscreen. Now we're being told we can't do that. If Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling think we're going to give a grand of our profits to every single Tom, Dick or Harry who pollutes our forecourt with some rusting old Metro he picked up from the scrap merchant for fifty nicker, expecting to burn off in a spanking new CR-V, the bastards can fuck themselves sideways with a bull bar."
A Ford spokesman concurred broadly, but suggested that the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer should, in the view of the Ford Europe management team, insert steering columns up each other's recta.
The manufacturers have suspended deliveries to their dealership networks, threatening both Dagenham and Swindon with burial under towering walls of brand new cars, which are reported to advancing on the towns at a rate of twenty metres per hour.
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