THE Scottish Government issued a news release on Tuesday about the Scottish Welfare Fund. The scheme began in April 2013 and since then more than 178,000 households, including around 59,000 families with children, have received support to buy essentials like nappies, food and cookers.

This help comes in the form of crisis grants to low-income households in a disaster or emergency and community care grants, which help folks to live independently. For the record, £81 million spent, not on “luxuries” or on the well-off, but on ordinary folk struggling to get by. The same folk who are forced to turn to food banks or school uniform banks. Many, in work. We know the stats – that around 60 per cent of the children living in poverty in Scotland live in a household where at least one adult is in work. The “working poor” are the fastest-growing group of people trying to get by in Scotland today, even before the main impact of the Tory welfare cuts begins to bite.

When the UK Government devolved council tax benefits to Scotland, it clawed back 10 per cent of the £400m it passed on. This is another gap the Scottish Government has plugged to make sure that those who need the help, get it.

I, for one, am pleased our Scottish Government is using some of its limited money to support these families and children. But I am angry that it has to.

There has been a lot of renewed talk in the past week or so of making better use of limited resources by “targeting” benefits and support. It sounds somehow fairer. Let those who can pay for prescriptions or the council tax do so. Then, the argument goes, we can concentrate on those who “need help”.

But all this talk of targeting and its veneer of fairness hides the core issue between universal support or, let’s give it its real name, selective support.

Universalism as a means of social provision means that we decide something is a fundamental part of the society we want and therefore we should make sure it is provided for everyone, like school education or the NHS. Selectivity is what we have when we think there are some things it is probably important to have but we do not have a collective responsibility to provide them for everyone – only for those in dire need and everyone else can take care of themselves.

There are many problems with the selective approach but let's take just two. First, academic study after academic study, and including the 2012 Reid Foundation Report on the case for universalism, demonstrate that increasing universalism increases social equality. Increasing selectivity decreases social equality. Increased social equality is a fundamental prerequisite to sustained and sustainable, economic growth.

We see that again as we are warned of a burgeoning economic crisis. No big surprise when the strategy for responding to the last one was to bail out banks but not introduce proper regulation; continue to protect the casino culture of the finance industry but not invest in the support and infrastructure to encourage and secure economic growth across the UK. As social inequality grows in the UK we are ill-placed to respond to yet another “crisis” of this Government and its ideology’s own making. And, all the while, those least responsible continue to pay and will now have heaped on their heads talk of “targeting” support as if somehow only those and such as those are worthy of help.

The economic shortsightedness of this beggars belief. But more than that. As we while away column inches and airtime with notions of selectivity all couched in that veneer of fairness, we miss the crux of the matter. That social equality is best helped by universality. That while free prescriptions might make life a bit easier for the well-off, it makes life 1,000 times better for those poorly-off and the long-term impact of that gain for all of us is far greater. That sustainable economic growth is best secured by government actively working to end low pay and increasing investment in infrastructure that includes childcare and training and education and research.

And that into all of this we bring a fair, progressive system of tax and support that encourages aspiration and growth, and embeds support for those who need it when they need it. All of this seems to me to be a blinding glimpse of the obvious. And we have done it before. That is exactly what we did in the years after the Second World War, which resulted in a more rapid improvement in people’s lives than seen before or since.

That’s why I am angry. Because for as long as we are part of a political union that gives us governments we don’t vote for and whose ideology is focused on protecting and enhancing the riches and privileges of the few, our Scottish Government can only ever “plug” gaps. Selectively.

And worse, as soon as we countenance debates about the selective use of resources for services we previously determined were central to the kind of society we want, we abandon the key principles of universalism. And when we do that, we give up on the idea of a fairer, more just and prosperous Scotland.

Let’s not fall into that trap.