On a recent visit to a friend living on one of Scotland’s islands, I had a conversation with the local policeman. It transpired that a largely law-abiding population was playing havoc with the statistics. There simply weren’t enough crimes being committed — and thus solved — to satisfy head office’s mania for numbers, so the officer was on a mission to drum up some business.

He was out with the speed camera one day and scrutinising tax discs the next. The latest initiative from an overenthusiastic sergeant had sent him on a tour of the island to identify abandoned vehicles, although you couldn’t abandon a mouse there without somebody reporting it. Thus was a peaceable community being harassed into unwittingly committing crimes to fulfil government targets.

I don’t know why I should be so bothered about this. Anybody who has paid taxes in this country for a decade or more is familiar with a system in which increasing a target seems to exist as an end in itself to satisfy officials whose primary job is to make the minister look good, or at least not too bad. I’ve certainly come across more disturbing examples in the past and I’m not against setting targets, assuming they are relevant.

My gorge rose again last week when Elish Angiolini, the lord advocate, gave evidence to Holyrood’s equal opportunities committee on the increase in violent offences perpetrated by women. It was the way in which she spoke of the phenomenon, as if she were a bemused anthropologist reporting on the baffling customs of some exotic tribe, and not Scotland’s top law officer. I longed for an MSP to ask her what she was planning to do about it.

Angiolini blamed the demon drink for the rise in knife-wielding women. I’m sure she is right to some extent. Glasgow, where the “booze ‘n’ blades” culture is at its worst, has been named as the third most violent city in Europe after Vilnius and Tallinn. Alcohol is a huge factor and it has to be tackled, which is why I applaud Kenny MacAskill’s stance. He is the first government minister to really face up to the problem and he deserves support.

Yet, I also sense that alcohol is becoming a pretext for ignoring some of the deeper and more complex issues. Dilys Rose, the Scottish poet, called alcohol “The National Excuse — for everything from bad-mouthing to murder”. Drink is certainly becoming the politicians’ excuse of choice for all of Scotland’s ills.

It is, in some ways, a highly convenient scapegoat, removing as it does the spotlight from government policy and the blame from the badly behaved. Alcoholism is an illness, after all. We may all be drinking like Charlie Kennedy but it’s not the government’s fault, nor our own. As HL Mencken, the US writer, observed: “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.”

At the heart of the issue of Scotland’s violent women lie some very uncomfortable truths. We have allowed a generation or three to abrogate all responsibility for their behaviour. If you want to reproduce without the financial means or the emotional stability to raise your children, go ahead. We don’t just condone it, we’ll pay you to do it. The right combination of benefits can pay considerably more than the minimum wage and a study by the think tank Civitas has suggested that the average family is £7,000-a-year better off if the parents split up.

It would have been unthinkable for Karen Matthews’s mother or grandmother to have generated the chaos and dysfunction she has achieved in her short life to date. Yet there are thousands like her in Scotland, producing a string of foul-mouthed, aggressive and neglected children by multiple fathers who, invariably, have little to do with their offspring.

Whereas communities once looked to each other for support, strengthening familial and societal bonds, now they look to the state. There is an incredible sense of entitlement among many of these women, who no longer feel the need to take any responsibility whatsoever for their children’s behaviour or wellbeing. Study after study has demonstrated that it is impossible to compensate for parenting deficiencies by outside interventions, yet that hasn’t stopped politicians from trying.

The way to deter antisocial behaviour — whether it is violent women or men — is to put the responsibility for that behaviour squarely with the protagonist. I’m not suggesting disbanding the welfare state. There are plenty of people who deserve to be looked after by society. But the welfare state was never envisaged as a mechanism for paying able-bodied young men to lounge around and commit mayhem. Nor was it meant to allow sexually and emotionally incontinent young women to spawn at will. It was designed as a safety net for the most vulnerable in society.

It seems axiomatic that if you carry a knife or commit a crime of violence, you should not have your lifestyle supported by law-abiding taxpayers. Yet even those who end up going to court for their crimes seldom have to face the extent of the misery and mayhem they have caused. The victim will be put through the wringer. But if the accused chooses not to give evidence, as most do, he or she will not face searching questions. For frequent offenders and their well-paid Legal Aid lawyers, it’s a sort of game. A few choice words from a judge is about as uncomfortable as it gets.

Expecting people to take full responsibility for their behaviour bolsters individual freedom and reduces the patronising attitude the ruling classes have to the rest of us. The problem is that politicians, particularly on the left, find it hard to give up the power they have to stage-manage the lives of the people they are trying to help. Allowing people to do what they want causes governments deep distress. It is their job to believe they have all the answers.

What Angiolini was describing last week — and it is worth bearing in mind that 92% of violent crime is committed by men — is not merely a problem with women or alcohol but with the evaporation of civil society. The lord advocate can look as bemused as she likes but there is no getting away from the fact that government policy is contributing to the destruction of our social fabric.

Meanwhile great swathes of the public sector, highly efficient, dedicated professionals such as the island policemen who really could make a difference, are engaged in pointless or counterproductive tasks designed to disguise failing government policies and bolster meaningless targets.