Tom Arthur is the SNP MSP for Renfrewshire South

ON April 25, 2018, the Scottish Parliament made history. On an otherwise ordinary evening, the Parliament came together as one to pass the Social Security (Scotland) Bill. This legislation was the product of over a year of detailed work and consultation. It creates a safety net for all people in Scotland. In presenting the final Bill to Parliament, then Social Security Minister Jeane Freeman said: “Today we write a new chapter in our history, a system built for the people of Scotland, designed in partnership with the people of Scotland, a system with dignity, fairness and respect at its heart, a system quite unlike any other that has gone before.”

As a relatively new MSP, I felt an immense sense of pride in playing a small part in making a big difference. It has been said that a society expresses its true values in how it treats its most vulnerable. In creating a Scottish social security system based on dignity, fairness and respect, the SNP Scottish Government, backed by Parliament, made a clear statement of its vision for the type of country Scotland should aspire to be.

WATCH: SNP MSP absolutely destroys despicable Tory on two-child limit

It is a vision I share. However, it is a vision which will only truly be realised when Scotland gains the powers of a normal independent country. And the need to gain these powers was once again made clear this week.

On Wednesday, almost six months to the day since the Social Security Act was passed, Parliament was witness to one of the most vile and ignorant speeches I have ever heard. In what I described at the time as six minutes of pompous Victorian moralising, the Tory welfare spokesperson, Michelle Ballantyne, stated that “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”.

Like many Tory arguments, it takes the word “fair” and twists it into a grotesque parody. To believe in Ballantyne’s concept of fairness one must believe that balancing austerity on the backs of children is fair. One must believe that the state should rank the worthiness of a child and their siblings by age alone. And one must regard the emotive decision on having a family as one to be taken with an abacus.

Perhaps the Tories would understand how abhorrent their thinking is if it were applied to another benefit, such as pensions. Would Michelle Ballantyne argue, on grounds of “fairness”, that there should be a cap on total payments or a maximum age of claimant?

Politics is full of complicated debates where compromise is required and the benefit of the doubt must be given. Therefore, it is the duty of MSPs to calmly and rationally consider policy proposals and to treat public money with responsibility. However, politics is at its heart a moral endeavour. It is about the values that underpin society and how we relate to one another. As such, there are times when there is simply a right choice and a wrong choice. When we consider political choices in light of our values then many apparent complexities melt away.

The two-child policy is an example of political decision making without a moral compass. To argue that “fairness” for

taxpayers trumps fairness for children shows the mindset of a bean counter and the heart of a miser. The Scottish Tories know that it reflects badly on them and they understand that it undermines their project to portray Ruth Davidson’s party as liberal and centrist. However, the past few days have shown that all the Tories’ efforts at distinguishing themselves from their Westminster counterparts go no further than presentation. In reality they are the same old nasty party that Scotland shunned long ago.

Some have recently asked what the Scottish Tories actually stand for, other than extreme Unionism. The words of the late Canadian-American economist John Kenneth Galbraith suggest an answer: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” Michelle Ballantyne is only but the newest modern conservative.