For opponents of the SNP’s 19-year-long squat in Bute House, it is tempting to fall into despair over this election.

Every single poll from every single polling company says the same thing: the SNP is going to win. The only bone of contention is whether John Swinney will lead his party to an overall majority or to another minority government.

Unless all of these polls are wrong by thwocking great margins, the SNP is about to rack up its fifth consecutive victory at Holyrood, a parliament set up by Labour with the promise that ‘the Union will be strengthened and the threat of separatism removed’.

Two decades of undermining education standards, missing NHS targets, presiding over record drugs deaths, and more recently pushing trendy extremism like gender ideology and Net Zero, and they seem set to be rewarded for it all.

Churchill called democracy ‘the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried’. I say we keep trying.

Given the resilience of the SNP, we could all just sigh, throw up our hands and check out of this election altogether. Or we could engage in a spot of tactical voting.

Now, I know the very idea doesn’t sit well with some. Shouldn’t we be voting for something rather than against something? If you’re fortunate enough to be in that position, then I agree that’s the best course of action.

As it happens, that’s what I’ll be doing. In Coatbridge and Chryston there’s a very good Labour candidate, Kieron Higgins.

He’s a local lad who used to work for Citizens Advice and seems to have the right priorities: not politics for its own sake but getting done what needs done, such as bringing back family doctors and funding more care packages so folk can be looked after in their own homes.

That’s something I can vote for without holding my nose, but in another constituency I would gladly vote for whichever Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat candidate was best placed to beat the SNP.

Why? Because whatever philosophical or policy differences there might be between those parties, none of them can be blamed for the past two decades of failure, neglect, ineptitude and political self-indulgence.

Some parties have been more effective than others in mounting opposition to the clueless establishment which has arrogantly mismanaged this country for 19 years.

There are flashpoints of disagreement, not all of them trivial, but when your country is on fire you don’t get to be choosy about the firefighters.

As for the arsonists, they are merrily dousing the joint in kerosene, talking up a return to divisive constitutional debates and sundry obsessions that have nothing to do with the day-to-day lives of ordinary people or the public services they rely on.

Holyrood’s electoral system hands an inbuilt advantage to a party like the SNP, with a core support built around a single issue and opponents split over several parties and with no core agenda around which they can coalesce. The best that is achievable is mitigating the excesses of nationalism, and the only people who can do that are the voters.

Voting tactically is a means of placing democratic curbs on the SNP, first and foremost in the form of a final seat tally south of 65, the magic number at which a Holyrood government gains majority status. This is entirely possible: the Nationalists have secured a majority in just one Scottish parliament election since devolution.

A minority SNP government is one which must work with other parties to get its legislation, and most important of all its Budget, voted through.

That means compromising with the Greens, which will drag the government’s agenda leftwards, or a party such as the Lib Dems, which would anchor policies and priorities in the centre ground. Either way, the SNP would be forced to choose.

More ambitious still would be tactical voting which not only deprives the SNP of an outright majority but keeps the combined number of SNP and Green MSPs below 65. That would be a nightmare scenario for John Swinney, trapping his party in power with no ability to ignore the opposition.

The Nationalists would be at the mercy of parliamentary votes on confidence, taxation, spending and the rest.

Absent a sudden surge in support for the Conservatives or Labour, it is highly unlikely the SNP and Greens will be denied a combined majority, but that is where our good friends the Greens come in handy. For although they are mere echoes of the SNP on independence, on a number of issues – the attainment gap, health outcomes, housing – they too have limited patience with Swinney’s government.

That doesn’t make them allies of those who want to see a prosperous, productive Scotland but it does mean the SNP cannot always rely upon its junior partner. And in the gap between two factions of Scottish nationalism there is space for some interesting and unexpected political developments.

So, holding the SNP below the surface is well worth it, even if this outcome falls far short of your ideal result.

Look, I know I’m not alone in longing for this marathon of the mediocrities to reach the finish line. Much like the 2024 general election, if it were an option on the ballot I reckon the None Of The Above party would win in a landslide.

Also like the general election, there is an immense gulf between the political class and the electors in how this election is perceived.

In 2024, Labour campaigners drank too deeply from the well of the London commentariat and convinced themselves there was a great public clamour for Keir Starmer. Come election night, they were met with a roaring Labour majority on a squeak of a vote share.

The country had voted Labour in mostly to get the Tories out.

If my encounters and correspondence are anything to go by, the voters are even more cynical this time around.

There is no love for any of the party leaders nor for what have so far been uninspiring manifestos.

I keep learning from one pundit or another that this party or that is up or down this week, that this leader or that has pulled off a strategic stroke of genius or fallen flat on their face.

Given a choice between the pundits and the punters, I choose the latter every time, and what I hear from them is frustration, tedium, and a desire to make the best out of a stinker of an election.

There is no love for John Swinney, a man with the personality of a PowerPoint presentation. Like Starmer, he will benefit from widespread public disaffection and, like Starmer, his party will in time come to pay the price for that.

Until then, the best option for the electorate, or at least that part that wishes Scotland to be governed well, is to acknowledge the flaws in all the parties but recognise that the shortcomings of the opposition pale compared to those of the SNP and the Greens, and vote accordingly.

Votes cast on May 7 will determine the composition of the Scottish parliament from now until 2031.

Weakening the SNP now makes them more beatable then.