At every Scottish election it now seems almost mandatory to have an accompanying debate about how SNP voters should exercise their list vote. People and parties with all sorts of ingenious proposals queue up to tell us that, if only we vote for them, we could fill the Parliament with independence politicians and set sail for independence.

It should come as no surprise that these calls mainly come from parties with very little support of their own, or from those who have won absolutely nothing under their own colours. Parties which, until an election appears on the horizon, have shown nothing but hostility and contempt towards the SNP suddenly plead with our voters to back them. They tempt us with talk of “super-majorities” and ridding Parliament of unionist politicians. It is, of course, all total bunkum.

Their argument is that, because of our dominance in the constituency vote, SNP list votes are wasted — that no SNP MSPs will be elected from the list and those votes would be better used next to their name. Like pound-shop Mystic Megs with their electoral crystal balls, they tell us that SNP victories are already in the bag.

The idea that you can predict or determine an election result before a single vote is cast is strictly for the birds. Absolutely no one knows what the outcome will be, and political predictions have a habit of blowing up in your face. This is especially true in the fast-moving and unpredictable electoral environment we find ourselves in today. Even if opinion polls are favourable to the SNP just now, how many times have we been told a party is cruising to victory, only for that to be overturned by an exit poll or a so-called “shock result”?

What these fringe parties are really asking us to do is take our own support for granted — to be so complacent and disrespectful to voters that we simply presume these votes are already in the bag. To do anything like that would be political arrogance of gargantuan proportions.

I’m not entirely sure whether they genuinely believe the SNP should somehow steer our supporters to vote for them, but the idea that the SNP would direct SNP voters to back another party they don’t support is simply ridiculous. For any political party to ask its supporters to vote for someone else is the strangest form of political suicide. You can only imagine the confusion on the doorstep when canvassers ask people to vote SNP, only to follow that up by asking them not to vote SNP.

Every constituency seat fought by the SNP is treated like a marginal, with every effort made to secure every last vote. The idea that we would do anything to compromise that effort is simply not credible.

The simple fact is this: the SNP needs list seats. We have set ourselves the goal of winning an SNP majority to advance our independence ambitions. If things do not go our way in some constituencies, we may have to rely on list votes to get us over the line. We should also never forget that the last SNP majority was achieved through a combination of constituency and list seats. We have won list seats at every election, and we need to do so again.

There is also a wider question about whether attempting to undermine the proportionality of the Parliament is something we should want to be part of at all.

Few people would describe the Scottish Parliament’s voting system as perfect. In fact, it is probably one of the least satisfactory forms of proportional representation available. For all its flaws, however, the system has produced outcomes that broadly reflect the popular vote. It is certainly vastly superior to Westminster, which routinely delivers some spectacularly disproportionate results.

The preference would be the Single Transferable Vote. Even though its introduction would likely be to our own electoral disadvantage, we should pursue it because it is the best form of PR and the

right thing to do. One consequence of STV would be the end of the artificial division between constituency and list MSPs. It would also end the current situation in which elections are effectively split into two parallel contests.

I may not like the presence of unionist MSPs in the Scottish Parliament, but they are there because people voted for their parties. Attempting to deny unionist parties representation by gaming the proportional element of the system risks denying the Scottish people their legitimate democratic choice. I’m not entirely sure trying to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Scots is the best way to progress independence. Even if most of the 29 per cent who currently intend to vote SNP on the list were to switch to another party it would not create another single additional independence supporter.

The better course is to stick to the plan. We have a very real chance of securing the 65 SNP MSPs that would replicate the conditions which triggered the last independence referendum. That remains our best opportunity to secure another referendum and to move our journey to independence forward. Current opinion polls suggest that smaller independence parties are unlikely to win any MSPs at all. For all the talk of “wasted votes”, voting for a party with no realistic prospect of winning a seat is the very definition of a wasted vote. The more list votes the SNP receives, the greater our chance of winning list MSPs.

This election is far too important to muck about with. The current political conditions present a golden opportunity to win an SNP majority, and we should not squander it — we may not see such favourable conditions again. So I say to all independence supporters: make it both votes SNP. There is no point in wasting your vote on a party or individual who cannot win. Having won an election by just 21 votes in 2017, I know the value of every single vote.

Make yours count.