A Dinky-sized rescue package?

While the likes of Pendragon and Sandicliffe are unlikely to say so, the Government's £2.3bn 'rescue' package for the UK car industry may well have been greeted with with a three-word response.
Is that it?
Put aside for one moment the Government's stated aim of encouraging car firms to invest in greener cars that will sell better in the future, and its guarantees for borrowing by those same businesses. Few would argue with the logic of them.
Ignore, also, a well-aimed barb delivered by Rushcliffe's own Ken Clarke in the House of Commons yesterday, the new shadow Business Secretary pointing out that this 'new' package includes EU money that has been available to the Government for months.
To state the obvious, the future is not the immediate issue.
As Nottinghamshire-based dealer groups like Pendragon and Sandicliffe will point out, the immediate problem is stocks of cars which lie unsold at manufacturers and dealers because buyers can't get credit.
Business Secretary Lord Mandelson is meeting the car industry again today to discuss the package he announced yesterday.
He is almost certain to be told that while the help he offered is welcome, it doesn't tackle the problem caused by car sales which fell off the face of a cliff towards the end of last year.
The car manufacturers were bound to run into trouble when the economy nosedived because some of their production has been driven by demand created by a credit bubble. Easy money meant easy car sales.
So car makers and dealer groups would have had to go through some adjustment anyway.
But the industry says that adjustment is being made unnecessarily damaging by the lack of consumer and business credit that is also hitting other industries.
This is what they want the Government to address - now.
French and German governments have chosen to tackle the unsold stockpiles and the need for cleaner cars in one go, offering buyers incentives to trade in their puthering jalopies for something newer. The US Government is throwing tens of billions at an industry it considers too big to fail.
Here, car makers and dealers are hoping a grown-up industry gets more than Dinky toy assistance.