If you walked in late to Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and missed the passing reference to the Anglais, the first scene on the beaches would leave you in little doubt that this was a film about the British. Amid the horrors of war, with the threat of imminent death hanging in the air, the soldiers are shown standing in orderly lines, waiting to board the boats that aren’t even there yet.

Queueing has become a symbol of Britain’s civilised, fair, quiet way of doing things. To undermine the queueing system is to undermine the national way of life. But that is precisely what is happening. Increasingly, if you’re prepared to pay, you can jump the line.

For the private sector, this is an easy way to cash in on surplus demand. For example, by offering her fans the opportunity to boost their position in the concert ticket queue by buying more merchandise, Taylor Swift’s profits can rise without prices changing. Because this rewards real fans rather than the touts, Swift can also claim the moral high ground with some credibility.

In contrast, there’s little to be said ethically in favour of services such as TaskRabbit which enable you to pay a modern-day servant to take your place in a line. More striking still is that public as well as private services are now abandoning one queue for all. At airports, those with cash in hand can get not only priority boarding but fast-track passport control. This is preferential treatment by the UK Border Agency, a department of the Home Office. Given that many governments even offer citizenship to people prepared to write large cheques, perhaps this should not be surprising.

If all this outrages you, get in line. But while you wait there patiently, think about whether the queue is all it is cracked up to be. If it promotes a kind of fairness, it is very different from social justice. If we think we should give each according to their need, queueing is a very bad way to go about it. The person at the front of the soup kitchen line gets fed even if the one at the end is hungriest. The sprightly youth at boarding gate 5 gets to sit down before the pensioner with an arthritic hip.

There is more genuine fairness in Mediterranean countries where people do not have the decency to queue but they do have the decency to not queue well. When buses arrive, for example, you don’t see groups of burly young men muscling their way to get on first. People generally give way to the weakest and frailest, irrespective of how long they have been waiting.

To think of queueing as morally superior is to confuse fairness with orderliness, a particularly British mistake

To think of queueing as morally superior is to confuse fairness with orderliness, a particularly British mistake. It is no coincidence that the golden age of queueing was when the class system was still rigidly in place. Queues offered reassuring images of egalitarianism when the reality was anything but. Rich and poor rarely had to queue for the same things. No one needed to pay for speedy boarding because hoi polloi didn’t even fly. While workers queued up at turnstiles to enter racetrack enclosures, the well-to-do would be greeted with a tip of that hat as they waltzed into the grandstand. The orderly queue to cash a giro at the Post Office was always longer than the one to deposit a cheque at the smart bank. Queues only equalise the people in them, they do nothing to address the inequalities that put people in different lines in the first place.

The rise of the brazen paid-for queue-jump is in part a manifestation of a wider democratisation and egalitarianism. It is only because so many of us now want the same desirable things that used to be for the few that demand is so high. What used to be organically rationed by class is now being allocated by cash.

First come, first served may be a better principle than highest-bidder-takes-all, but neither is ideal. When none are more deserving of a particular good than another, forming a queue is inefficient. It leads to frustrations such as spending hours watching a computer screen announcing how many hundreds of people are ahead of you in the ticket queue, as I did today, only to end up with nothing at the end of it. The most egalitarian way to manage demand is by ballot.

Nor is queueing the simple solution to the problem of money trumping need. When two people are in equal need of an operation, it is reasonable to treat the person who has waited longest first. But when one needs treatment much more than another, queue-jumping is not just morally acceptable, it’s desirable.

Queueing has always been much more a pragmatic means of keeping order than an ethical practice to promote fairness. It is not therefore the end of queueing that should disturb us but the money-talks culture that has replaced it.

• Julian Baggini is the author of Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will