I see a lot of people who run around talking about voting SNP in both their constituency and on the list in May. People should be aware of the dangers of doing that, if they’re looking for an indy majority. The system we have for selecting a government heavily penalises any dominant party.

Tactical voting under D’Hondt and AMS simply do not work, and voting tactically for the SNP on the list is an extreme example of this. Even if the SNP manages to capture 50 per cent of the list vote in, say, Glasgow. It will effectively count only as 5 per cent. If, as seems likely, the SNP wins all constituencies in Glasgow, their list vote count will be divided by 10. A hundred thousand votes will count as 10 thousand.

At the same time, when Scottish Labour loses all its Glasgow constituencies, the penalty against them is removed. Their list vote count will not be divided at all because they’ve won no constituencies. And they will still capture 20 per cent of the list vote in May, or thereabout. For every Labour voter in Glasgow, the SNP must get 10 list voters to offset that. Scottish Labour’s count will be divided by each list seat they win, but they’re going to go through 3 to 4 candidates before their vote count drops below that of the SNP.

Our system of electing governments was created to make a majority very difficult to achieve. That’s what it is designed to do. We may argue that we should have a different system, and we probably should in an Indy Scotland. But that’s not the situation we have now.

Voting tactically for the SNP on the list in Glasgow simply means that Margaret Curran and Anas Sarwar is given a free path back to the trough. This because tactical voting doesn’t work under our more proportional system of elections, and the worst kind of tactical voting one can do is to vote for a heavily dominant party.

So, in conclusion, our election system gives people two votes. It is designed so that one vote goes to a party in the constituency, and another vote goes to another party. Stepping away from this will be penalised by the system. That’s just the way it is, and attempting to game it will end in tears. Or with Margaret Curran and Anas Sarwar smirking in their new seats in Holyrood with a new lease on the trough.