AS the General Election approaches, the SNP are so focused on telling Scottish voters that Labour will win at Westminster without their help that there is a danger the reasons to vote for Holyrood’s party of government in the UK ballot will be lost.

You can see why Humza Yousaf is talking up Labour’s chances. The message, “if you want to guarantee kicking out the Tories, vote Labour”, has a simple yet powerful logic.

Who doesn’t want to see the back of Rishi Sunak and his cronies?

Who isn’t sick of watching politicians such as Michelle Mone pocketing wads of cash as a result of Covid contracts awarded to a company in which she has an interest?

We don’t need to ask if Labour will be any better. They literally could not be worse. How many people outside Douglas Ross and his inner circle would if given the choice rather see the Tories back in power than a Labour victory? At a rough guess, the answer would be none.

The SNP know this only too well. The party is not a contender for victory in this election and so is condemned to sit watching on the sidelines hoping its only foe is the lesser of two evils. On the face of it, this is not an exciting proposition.

The fact is, though, the SNP have to find a way of making it exciting. The fact is that a Labour victory WILL be better than another Tory government, but it will be a very long way from good for Scotland. Remember, we have been here before. We have placed our faith in Labour governments before. We have had hopes of a better, fairer life and we have seen those hopes dashed. Such wild hopes are not even on the agenda this time round.

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This week, Labour’s Scottish leader Anas Sarwar lined up with his boss Keir Starmer to tell us there is not the slightest hope of the party adopting any of the left-wing policies that might challenge the domination of greed over redistribution of wealth, the interests of the shareholders over the needs of the wealth creators. It may not be another five years of Rishi Sunak but it will be another five years of only slightly more palatable Tory policies.

This, of course, will be dismissed as fantasy by those legions of political analysts in the Scottish media who have never fallen out of love with Labour but have waited patiently for their revival because they would rather a return to the poverty of ideas and ambition which has scarred Labour for decades than consider for a second that independence might allow us to do better.

Kezia Dugdale was infuriated enough to vote SNP after the Brexit decision. But only once. Never again, she vowed, and never again did she wander from the Labour path. Why not? The Tories pressed ahead with Brexit. Labour pressed ahead with doing nothing to stop it and then refusing to even countenance reversing it.

And when Brexit happened it was, almost unbelievably, even worse than its unhappiest critics warned. Not bad enough, though, to persuade Kezia that when it came to the party she took to the jungle to flee, the game was well and truly up. Instead. she simply returned to the fold, never to sin again. Why on earth not?

And so this week we saw the party’s current leader lecture the Scottish Government for concentrating too much on social justice and not on enough economic growth. That would be the type of economic growth that sees the power companies pocket billions while the rest of us scramble about trying to find the cash to pay power bills which tripled. The type of economic growth that sees the return of eye-watering bonuses for bankers while interest rates rise to the extent that an entire generation have been excluded from the “property-owning democracy” we were hoodwinked into embracing.

And that would be the same Scottish Labour leader who argued for a ceasefire as children were slaughtered in their thousands on the altar of Israel’s bloodthirsty demand for revenge. The same Scottish Labour leader who was put in his place by Keir Starmer, who denied saying that Israel had a right to that revenge when we all HEARD HIM SAYING IT.

The Labour Party, of course, was only too happy to sate its bloodlust on the battlefields of Afghanistan to put a smile on the face of George W Bush. And here we were this week being told the Scottish Government should be paying far more attention to the insatiable appetites of the money men and far less on social justice.

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Kezia Dugdale was slightly miffed by Labour’s inaction over Brexit. Anas Sarwar swallowed hard and said nothing as his boss argued the semantics of what would make a ceasefire “sustainable” and does nothing as Rafah is pummelled by Israeli bombs. And we’re supposed to celebrate the impending General Election victory of this party on the grounds that it’s not quite as nakedly repulsive as the Tories.

I’ll be voting SNP at the General Election and I will not be doing so with fingers crossed that the rest of the UK will be doing the right thing and giving the Tories their marching orders. If the rest of the UK wants the Tories back in power then so be it. It’s not Scotland’s job to be Britain’s conscience. We’ve done that and it hasn’t worked. All we got in return is being told we don’t have the right to have a say in our future.

I will be voting SNP because they are the party most closely aligned with the principles I want this country to represent. Principles that admit we have problems with the National Health Service which we are trying to solve but have allowed the NHS north of the Border to avoid industrial action and went some way to paying health workers what they are worth

Principles that encourage an end to the vengeful slaughter in Gaza and stand up for the triumph of humanity, that recoil from the cruelty of trying to take refugees to Rwanda and the embarrassingly crass nonsense of recruiting TikTok influencers in a bid to persuade migrants not to set sail across the Channel in small boats.

I’ll be voting SNP because they are the only party who hold out the hope not just of ending the cost of living crisis but of building a country where the chances of another such crisis are greatly reduced. An independent country which would protect the most vulnerable from economic downturns instead of waiting for a trickle down which never materialises. This week’s economic news is proof that the alternative to independence is recession after recession.

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I’ll be voting SNP and praying that others do the same because I never want to hear Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar tell us that a downturn in the SNP vote translates into a downturn in support for independence when they did not recognise the party’s unprecedented success in winning 56 of the 59 Scottish seats in 2015 as a mandate for independence.

Anas Sarwar said this week that there are no circumstances which would lead the arch-Unionist Labour Party to agree to a second referendum. When someone tells you who they are, it is wise to believe them.

It will take more than the SNP to deliver independence. Believe in Scotland’s Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp is right to urge the Yes movement to revitalise the campaign. The responsibility for fresh thinking and new ideas does not rely on the SNP alone.

We all have our part to play. But as we face a UK General Election on the way to a crucial 2026 Holyrood election, part of our responsibility is not to weaken support at the ballot box for the biggest pro-independence party. It will take more than the SNP to deliver independence, but the Yes momentum will falter without them.