It’s awful to follow up this blog’s best day ever (in terms of visitors) with absolutely no posts at all, but that’s exactly what I’m doing. Going to the cinema to watch In The Loop in a few minutes, then I’ve got a backlog of post ideas that need writing up – so much is going on it’s going to take me all weekend to get it all out.

Until then…

Let’s make this absolutely clear. A subsidy of between £2k and £5k on electric cars, starting 2011, is “Good” protectionism. All the other forms of protectionism are bad, but if it’s the Green Industry? Well that’s totally different.

The Government has a problem – that problem is that people don’t want electric cars. They want us to want them, so they’re going to help us to want them by using £250,000,000 of taxpayer’s cash to reduce the sticker price of these awful things. Bribing us with our own money to create a whole new dependent industry: Rapture!

The scheme starts in 2011 – which gives the car companies plenty of time to begin designing, testing then mass producing what’s sure to be the hot sellers of that year. At least, that’s what Labour hopes, but I suspect the car manufacturers will wait until the next General Election before investing hard cash – assuming they have hard cash left by then.

Labour assure us that by 2011 they’ll have enough renewable energy sources feeding the National Grid to offset all the addition electricity required by these toy cars. Despite the obvious rationality and believability of this plan, I’m still left thinking, “clowns.” I wonder why?

Well, I’m thinking “clowns” because that’s exactly what they are. No offense to clowns, obviously.

But on the negative side for the LDs,  Labour’s doing a grand old job of daring us to go further.  I can see it now: Lib Dems screaming at Labour, “You’re not going far enough!” while the rest of the country backs away from us looking slightly embarrassed – and a bit scared. Except for the Greens, of course, who glower at us and call us traitors.

With Green stuff, you just can’t win. I still stand by my opinion that it’s electoral poison. The only reason this policy is even being considered is because it’s the only way the Government can dump money on the Car Industry without incuring the wrath of the EU.

The real pity is that the market will not be allowed to decide what comes after oil based engines – the politicians want to do that for us.

Imagine at the start of the Betamax/VHS war*, the British Government had decided to subsidise sales of Betamax players to encourage companies to build factories and so on. In the real world the market decided that VHS was the better technology (it had longer tapes to record onto… who knew?), and so it’s a very good thing we didn’t sink taxpayer’s money into the rival, but this is what we’re about to do to the car industry. We’re about to plough1 serious cash into the Betamax of Next Generation Personal Transportation.

At least, that’s what Labour will do to the car industry if they get a 4th term. I’m thinking… “Electric Leyland” I’m thinking… you know what? New Labour is very, very dead isn’t it?

*Let’s not have any boring Betamax Versus VHS arguments. This you can’t win, and it’ll just be humiliating for everyone involved.

1 – Thank you Blackacre, via Pedant’s Corner.

Congrats to Cllr Allan Witherick who managed to blag a spot on Radio 5′s Drive show by rapping his manifesto and sticking it on Youtube. They weren’t impressed – that awful Victoria woman was merciless and got him to admit it was dire, but as Allan pointed out: He got on the Radio, didn’t he?

His story also crops up in The Telegraph

I say good on him. Wish I could blag a spot on the Radio myself

A Nurse who did some secret filming to expose neglect of the elderly has been banned from working by the Nursing and Midwifery Council… for misconduct. 

Enough said, really.

See, The Right, as I’m calling them for the sake of an easy pun, have an image problem. This snap, stolen from Flikr thanks to Chicky Yog, shows some highly optimistic Pro-Capitalism G20 protestors. Chicky calls them, “masters of the universe.”

… which strikes me as odd. These guys don’t look like masters of the universe to me. 

Some people look at these lads and see Capitalists of the Future, or Elitist Snobs… especially the one on the far left – he looks far too respectable with his resplendant spectacles. 

But you want to know what I see? I see a bunch of Dorks. Nerds. Geeks. The suits don’t fool me, even Mr Fancy Pants there.  See, geeks and nerds are, well… they’re my kind of people, if I’m honest. I like big brains. Pfft, there’s worse things to like. 

But the suits? Sheesh. I get that they wanted to stand out from the crowd, but these pictures are painful. If your point is that The Establishment is actually statist and left wing, then why adorn yourselves in the trappings of The Establishment? I won’t elaborate on this. Alix Mortimer already covered the nerve shredding sight of yoof in ties in great detail before I did.

Why are younger people more left wing than older people? Maybe it takes a lot more guts for an 18 year old to say, “hey, I wanna be friends with those guys” than it does for a 32 year old curmudgeon who, really, couldn’t be cool if she tried.