It’s said that the best New Year’s resolutions are specific in nature, which makes them easier to keep. So the most popular, “lose weight” or “get in shape”, are generally bad resolutions, so vague that they’ll be forgotten about before January gives way to February.

By that reckoning, the SNP’s list of “resolutions” for election year are rather woolly. “We will always stand up for Scotland,” proclaims the first, followed by predictable stuff about “protecting” the NHS and opposing Trident.

Also on the list are delivering on a promise to double “free childcare” by the end of the next Holyrood parliament, and ensuring that university education “will always be free”, both examples of the Scottish Government’s long-standing commitment to “universal” provision of (certain) benefits.

This is interesting, for it suggests that the “hard challenge” required of Naomi Eisenstadt, the Scottish Government poverty adviser appointed last June, is falling on deaf ears. As the Herald revealed last week, her memo to the First Minister highlighted “policy tensions” around the devolved government’s approach to the above two policy areas.

Eisenstadt questioned the cost of spending cash “on those who could fund themselves”, and, intriguingly, these “contentious issues” weren’t just her own view, but had been raised with her in meetings with civil servants, voluntary sector staff, local authority representatives and academics.

The poverty adviser’s first report is due in the coming weeks, and while that might set out a more nuanced view, the Scottish Government’s reluctance to allow publication of Ms Eisentstadt’s memo betrays its unease at her obvious difficulty with a universal approach, at least in certain areas. Few, for example, would question universal schooling or health care.

Any attempt to question its application elsewhere, however, has a tendency to result in cries of “Red Tory”. A remarkable letter in Friday’s Herald, for example, showed evident disdain for “evidence-based” solutions to inequality, and although Iain Ferguson signed himself Honorary Professor of Social Work and Social Policy at the University of the West of Scotland, he clearly held “experts” or “tsars” such as Ms Eisentstadt in low regard.

Tackling inequality, Mr Ferguson asserted, was not merely a technical matter, but rather a “political issue” raising “fundamental questions about the distribution of wealth in society”. I agree, but surely that was the point Eisenstadt (whom Mr Ferguson considers guilty by association with Tony Blair’s first administration) was making: that at present certain universally-provided policies distribute wealth in the wrong direction, ie from those most in need to those who could generally afford to contribute towards the cost of childcare or higher education.

Mr Ferguson’s letter also aired the two most common responses to critics of universality: cost and stigma. The former runs that the cost of means testing, dealing with appeals, etc, can outweigh the savings from a more selective approach. This is certainly true in some cases – ie prescription charges – but less so in other domains such as higher education, where as the education expert Lucy Hunter Blackburn has demonstrated, administration costs are actually rising despite the absence of tuition fees.

The cost argument also contains a logical inconsistency, for where does it leave a progressive system of income tax, which generally costs quite a lot to administer, as does housing benefit, which for perfectly valid reasons is means-tested. Would Ferguson, like Republican presidential contender Rand Paul, rather Scotland had a flat tax in order to save on administration? Somehow I suspect he’d balk at that idea. Besides, any public service has administration costs, whether means-tested or not.

Regarding the second objection of “stigma”, Mr Ferguson quotes from a Common Weal report asserting that universal provision brings Scots together, stops us allocating blame and promotes dignity for all. Now I don’t know which Scotland this purports to describe, but it certainly isn’t the status quo. And while there’s evidence stigma can affect benefits take-up, it’s less compelling when applied to tuition fees. When, for example, I received a means-tested grant at Aberdeen University between 1997-99 I didn’t feel at all stigmatised, but grateful for the admittedly modest cash support.

And there’s a wider point too: what about the stigma that attaches itself to those who still can’t get one of the limited number of subsidised university places while affluent middle-class students from Edinburgh glide into St Andrews University as they always have? Or if they do get a place, then struggle to cover their living costs (and, after graduation, debt) as the Scottish Government puts more of the onus on loans rather than non-repayable student support?

After housing costs, meanwhile, Eistenstadt was struck that 18 per cent of Scots are classified as poor, and it’s difficult to see how universal provision works in their favour: few if any of that cohort will be studying theology at St Andrews or law at Glasgow. And simply dismissing her points as Blairite (as Mr Ferguson did) is ad hominemism of the worst sort. After all, she has also called for “a whopping great inheritance tax” and higher rates of income tax for the rich – hardly very Blairite.

Part of the difficulty is that the SNP’s generic appeal to universalism in this regard rather implies that all education is the same – except it isn’t: school (where everyone is entitled to a place) isn’t like university (where entry is still selective in spite of free tuition). More to the point, despite Nicola Sturgeon’s recent claim that Scotland’s universities are “accessible to growing numbers of students from deprived backgrounds”, compared with progress in England and vis-a-vis the cost of maintaining free tuition, “growing” is a relative term.

But then of course the Scottish Government’s commitment to universal childcare and higher education has little to do with empirical reality, it’s all about maintaining a high-profile point of differentiation between “progressive” Scotland and right-wing “Tory” England. And however pragmatic the First Minister might be in private, once universal provision is extended (as it was by the first Labour/Lib Dem Scottish Executive with free personal care), it’s almost impossible to withdraw.

Scottish Labour know this only too well. More than three years ago its then leader Johann Lamont deployed unfortunate language (“something for nothing”) in questioning certain elements of universal provision, but such was the onslaught from the SNP that not only was there no follow through in policy terms, but since then Labour has found itself trapped between an accurate analysis of the problem but fear of proposing a politically unpalatable alternative.

Tomorrow at Holyrood the First Minister will doubtless deploy the useful rhetoric about “transforming” Scotland and tackling inequality as she seeks an unprecedented third term for the SNP, as well as her own direct mandate as First Minister, but it seems what a Scottish Government spokesperson referred to as “frank and honest” advice from her poverty adviser won’t influence the substance of her election prospectus. As ever, some New Year’s resolutions are difficult to keep.