CONSERVATIVE MSP for South Scotland Michelle Ballantyne is facing calls to resign over comments she made during a Holyrood debate on inequality. She defended the UK Government’s controversial two-child cap on tax credits, saying: “The two-child limit is about fairness. It is fair that people on benefit cannot have as many children as they like, while people who work and pay their way and don’t claim benefits have to make decisions about the number of children they can have.”

For all the justified outrage at the callousness of Michelle Ballantyne’s comments – it’s important to remember that she is fully in line with Conservative party policy. She didn’t go off script – the “fairness’’ argument in relation to the two-child cap IS the script.

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Theresa May herself has said: “We believe that people who are in work have to make the same decisions as those people who are out of work, so that people on benefits have to decide whether they can afford more children, just as people in work have to decide.”

The language might be more temperate, but the message is the same: poor people with more than two children are a drain on the system.

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The UK Government’s justification for raiding the coffers of low-income families relies heavily on the myth of the “scrounger”. It’s a story that paints those reliant on social security – for whatever reason – as the villains. It’s not logical, of course – but stories don’t need to be.

It ignores the reality that the two-child cap affects people who are both in and out of work. It assumes that illness, bereavement, separation and redundancy are not things that a “responsible” citizen could reasonably be expected to factor in to a 10-year plan.

The scrounger is an entirely fictional creation. It says that women – who cuts to social security hit the hardest – have found a way to game the system. They have multiple unwanted children as a route to a life of luxury and ease, raking in the tax credits while “the rest of us” must work for a living.

Anybody who receives child tax credits will know that they are not an incentive to have more children than you would otherwise want to. Michelle Ballantyne has children, so she should know that the process of growing them is no walk in the park. I remember with great clarity the nine months of relentless heartburn, being unable to sleep, crippling pelvic pain and feeling permanently crabbit. That’s before the agony of childbirth, the terror of learning how to care for a newborn – and the lifetime of responsibility and parenting that follows.

Child tax credits are the difference between turning on the heating when the temperatures drop or putting a jumper on instead. They are bus fares, lunches, tampons or a new school coat. What they are not is a one-way ticket to a feckless, luxury lifestyle.

The right to have a family shouldn’t be based on whether you are inured from life’s challenges and gifted with privilege and inherited wealth. There will be few reading this who fall into that category.

Think of your own families and the circumstances of your birth – who would you be in the Tory’s story? Would your mother be the hard-working hero, or the scrounging villain?

Like Michelle Ballantyne, my own mum has six children. She worked in a variety of jobs, as a cleaner, a carer and in social work. At various times, we required the safety net of social security. My mum’s life has been far from easy. In raising our family, she endured the hard, back-breaking slog that many working-class women will recognise.

We shouldn’t underestimate the power that the scrounger myth has among voters – even those who receive some form of social security themselves.

When the Tories talk of shirkers and scroungers, the nursery worker, retail worker or janitor who receives child-tax credits doesn’t see themselves in that description.

They assume the UK Government must be speaking about somebody else – this “other” shadowy social-security claimant – because they know they work hard and certainly don’t have an easy life.

Michelle Ballantyne isn’t the first politician to utilise this myth to promote an ideology that justifies reducing support for low-income families. What made her comments in Holyrood so bewildering is that you get the sense she genuinely believes them. Ruth Davidson – while supporting the two-child cap – has been careful to side-step the gruesome narrative and myth-making that underpins it.

Is that better or worse than Ballantyne’s Dickensian indignation?

I’m not sure. Either way, the effect is the same. Low-income families will still bear the brunt of Tory party policies – regardless of whether or not they believe their own excuses.