YOU might think that giving the mother of every new born baby in the country a box that doubles up as a crib, which contains some necessities to help get the baby off to a decent start in life, would be universally seen as a good thing, a kind thing, a thing to gladden the heart of even the most cynical soul.

But no, this is Scotland, and on Scottish social media those who believe that everything that the SNP does is evil managed to find reasons why it’s evil to give mothers and newborns a few useful bits and pieces, a starter kit for infancy.

If the SNP managed to find a way of adding 50 years of healthy life expectancy to everyone in the country, these are the same people who would complain that the Scottish Government is putting hard-working undertakers and grave-diggers out of work. Will no one think of the crematoria eh?

The baby box scheme is projected to cost just £6 million a year. A similar scheme has been running in Finland for 75 years where it has been claimed to help tackle infant mortality. The Scottish baby box was immediately criticised by the Labour Party, although you’d have thought that a party that’s dying in its own cradle might not rush to attack the scheme. Meanwhile Tory MSPs were gutted to realise that acting like babies having a tantrum on Twitter didn’t make them eligible. It’s outrageous, spending £6 million on a universal benefit for infants.

The Tories believe we should be spending the money on sensible things instead, like renovating Buckingham Palace, renewing Trident, or paying for the costs of registering foreigners after Brexit.

Like the Finnish baby box, the Scottish box contains nappies, clothing, a changing mat, a mattress and blanket, books and other items which are essential in early infancy.

The Scottish box also contains a poem in Scots by the Makar, Jacky Kay, which led some of the zoomier and frothier Unionists on social media to assert darkly that filling the heads of infants with linguistic propaganda is the “real” reason behind the boxes. This claim was made on January 1, so the year had hardly started and already we’d reached peak yoonzoom.

These are the people who probably believe that the only reason the Scottish Government wants to tackle infant mortality is because independence supporters tend to be younger and the more children who survive infancy the quicker it will be to outbreed the Unionists.

We can only be grateful that the baby box didn’t also contain a poem in Gaelic, or NHS Scotland would have been bankrupted by the spannerbags of zoomers who required emergency treatment for apoplexy. As it was, we only had to endure those who quoted Adolf Hitler as though somehow that was a reason for the Scottish Government not to assist mothers and infants and who railed against the £6 million annual cost of the scheme.

Six million pounds is how much it costs to install two Gaelic road signs on the A9, at least that’s how much you think they cost if you’re a Tory MSP in Holyrood with a burning need to feel that English monoglots are oppressed.

Of course it’s a well known-fact among the spanneresque brigade that the original draft of Mein Kampf was written in Lewis Gaelic and supporting anything related to Scottish languages is just one step away from advocating genocide.

Others were outraged because the scheme is universal. Every mother of every newborn will receive a box. Somehow this was perverted in the eyes of the more vehement nawbags into an attempt by the SNP to lay claim to every Scottish child. Others thought that the baby box was just another SNP lie, because it doesn’t actually contain a baby. Meanwhile the Tories are threatening to investigate whether the baby box counts as an extra bedroom for the purposes of the bedroom tax.

The claim has been made that the introduction of baby boxes in Finland helped to reduce infant mortality in that country. However, the introduction of baby boxes in that country also coincided with the introduction of universal social services, universal social security benefits, a comprehensive health service accessible to all, and the extension of workers’ rights and maternity rights, all of which no doubt played a vital role in reducing Finnish infant mortality to one of the lowest rates in the world. The key factor in ensuring a low rate of infant mortality is the introduction and maintenance of social democratic policies.

The kind of policies, in other words, that are increasingly at threat in a Brexit Britain that’s heading out of the door of Europe.

What reduces infant mortality, what reduces poor health outcomes for the disadvantaged, what reduces poverty and deprivation, is universality of social provision. Labour has abandoned its traditional commitment to universality, but when a benefit becomes means-tested it not only adds to the costs of administering the scheme, it also means that it becomes second-class and low-quality. The baby box scheme is a small and welcome return to universality. We’re aw Jock Tamson’s bairns. It’s only Tories who think that means that only Jock Tamson should pay for them.

Means-testing the boxes would add a fortune to the administration costs of the scheme, meaning that fewer women would receive a poorer-quality box, which would then be seen as a poor box, not a baby box.

It would be seen as a symbol of exclusion and deprivation, not as a symbol that all children deserve an equal welcome to the world.

Baby boxes themselves won’t have a huge impact on Scottish infant mortality rates.

But that’s not the point. The point of baby boxes is to demonstrate that as a society we value and support new mothers and that every child in this country deserves to be valued and supported equally. That’s what baby boxes are for, and it’s by continuing and developing the universalist ethos that baby boxes represent that Scotland will reduce infant mortality and give every child in this country the best start in life.