Different people have different income levels and (arguably more importantly) different priorities. To use your easy jet analogy:

Person A may have an average income but considers queueing to get on a plane intolerable (maybe he has kids, maybe he’s nervous of flying, maybe he’s a smoker, maybe he just dislikes queuing) and might therefore make a financial sacrifice elsewhere (doing without duty free, staying in a cheaper hotel, whatever) to avoid it.

Person B might be a millionaire, easily able to afford to queue jump, but isn’t bothered by waiting in line so won’t pay to avoid the queue.

Who is benefiting from “inequality” ?

Gosh, how dare someone try to lower the tax burden on their voters.

It’s a point worth bearing in mind though: whenever we say we “don’t have the money” to do something seemingly very important, it’s worth wondering how it is we manage to continue paying for seemingly much less important things at the same time. This should tell us that the problem isn’t the principle of spending money on the right things (which almost everyone would sign up to) but the practical difficulties of achieving it.

The Tory approach seems to be, to an extent, to give control of the budget to the people receiving the services. For example the choice between cleaners or respite carers. On the face of it, this seems sensible enough. The problem is that the budget given over to this is very small to begin with – the vast, overwhelming majority of spending is still at the discretion of largely unaccountable bodies and can’t be redirected easily, even if it’s not really doing anyone any good.

The ultimate betrayal of the Babyboomers…the gluttonous pigs in the economic pipe-line. Retiring around now, nest well feathered…thinking about how they might one day need a bit of looking after…What these these egalitarian paragons, these progressive 68ers come up with…”I’m alright Jack…I’ve done Ok and, frankly, if you haven’t made sufficient provision,you can just bloody well sit there in your own piss all day. It’s not my problem, I bet you didn’t even buy any BT shares you feckless twat!”

Barnet is preparing itself for 3% (real term) grant cuts for at least five years. Even before cutting Council tax that means that, by the end of the period, they will have £7 to spend for every £8 they have to-day. This seems like a realistic estimate of the financial pain that all Councils will have to go through.

To focus on the specific question of residential wardens, what I suspect Barnet want (but do not yet have the legislative freedom to provide, though I may well be wrong on this) is the ability to provide a range of services in sheltered housing schemes, to provide wardens to the (probably relatively few) residents whose mental and emotional health would be at risk otherwise (because of their isolation, lack of family etc) funded from personal care budgets and to provide a charged-for service to others who want but do not need it. If this is so, I suspect that not a few Labour and Lib Dem councils would want to do the same thing.

What worries me (well it would, I’m a Council tenant) is that Tory “freedom” for Councils will mean an end to ring-fencing the Housing Revenue Account and milking Council tenants to pay for General Fund services.

I don’t know what Carl’s last paragraph is trying to say – our public services have always been a mixture of universal free provision and various forms of charging. And this seems to sit quite well even with lefties – where, for example, was the campaign over the last ten years for universal free dentistry or prescriptions?