Unconscionably Constitutional

From the London Review of Books; the country, or state, known as the United Kingdom of Great britain and Northern Ireland has changed so much under New Labor that something new and perhaps unrecognizable has started to come into sharp focus...

There’s an episode of The Wire in which the
intellectual drug baron Stringer Bell, trying to launder his gang’s profits by
legitimate real estate development, finds the project stalled by bureaucratic
delays. He is tactfully advised by his contractor that it takes money in the
right place to get things moving. Bell is outraged; but, as the contractor
explains, it’s ‘democracy in action’. The day after I had laughed aloud at this,
I read that one of the London boroughs is considering introducing such a system:
if you want your planning application dealt with promptly, it will cost you,
while for everyone else the wait will get even longer. The difference is that
this system will be entirely above board.

Is it constitutional for a
public authority to offer different standards of public service in return for
premiums? Fifty years ago it might well have been doubted. But the postwar
notion that the state provided service according to need, and that if queues
formed they were not to be jumped, has given way to an entrepreneurial model in
which, subject to a safety net at one level or another, you pay for what you get
and you get what you pay for. Each concept has acquired constitutional
legitimacy in its time – for, as John Griffith famously observed, the
constitution is what happens.