Easycouncil?

You can usually tell that a party is on the verge of taking power, when all their fringe lunatics start flag flying their weird policy peccadilloes in the hope that they´ll get adopted when their man gets the big chair. You´ve got 1980s Young Conservatives throwback Daniel Hannan (Enoch was right, the NHS is evil and Stalinist etc etc.)

And now, Barnet council, the EasyCouncil or RyanCouncil:

Residents living in Barnet, north London will be able to pay more for improved services, in a move inspired by airlines that forced down the cost of air travel by placing surcharges on non-essential items.

The new policy has been dubbed “easyCouncil” by a council spokesman.

Perhaps not the best policy PR ever, given that most people hate the shitty service on budget airlines.

Councils across Britain are coming under increasing pressure to restrain their spending in the recession, as tax returns fall and pension fund deficits swell.

A spokesman for Barnet council said that the no-frills airline analogy was about making the council more flexible and responsive to residents’ needs, and did not mean that core services would be cut.

“The traditional model of public services has been like walking into a shop and finding everything is a size 35 and medium blue. People are getting used to having choice, and public services have to follow.”

The details of the plan apparently seem to be – paying more for better services using your council budget and own money.

Obviously it´s about spending less on services, everything is these days with coming public sector cuts. Probably quite a good way of presenting it, given that people have a choice on what they spend their money.

But you can´t avoid the feeling with all of this stuff, that firstly the ´we demand choice´ idea exists only in the minds of politicians, and that actually we´re rather have like it or lump it services that work. That the resources that go into giving us ´choice´ could easily just be put into providing those services. That in the end all of these schemes are basically attacks on the idea that we get uniform, free at the point of use public services paid for by progressive taxation in favour of the idea that we contract in services from private companies making a profit.