AUSTERITY will be “here until doomsday” under the SNP and its proposals for independence, Gordon Brown has insisted.

The former prime minister accused the Nationalists and the UK Government of presiding over the worst decade of NHS growth since it was created 70 years ago.

Addressing Labour supporters in Glasgow, he said it was a “national disgrace” that under the SNP, Scotland’s NHS growth rate was even lower than the rest of the UK.

He insisted: “In 2018, we need far better. The Conservatives and SNP are betraying cherished founding principles of the NHS.”

Mr Brown also blasted the SNP’s Growth Commission report, which was released last month and has divided some nationalists over its vision of limited public spending in the decade following independence.

He said: “You look now at the SNP’s proposals for independence. They will not be spending money on the health service this decade, they won’t be spending it the next decade, and they won’t be spending it the decade after.

“Austerity is here until doomsday if the SNP is all that is going to confront it.”

Mr Brown highlighted the verdict of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) – the country’s leading economic think tank – which argued the SNP's independence blueprint implies a decade of austerity and public service cuts.

He said current projections showed the average annual NHS growth in the UK for the decade from 2010/11 is set to fall to 1.1 per cent.

And Scotland’s average growth is even worse, he argued, at only one per cent between 2010 and 2017. Mr Brown insisted the NHS needs a minimum of five per cent every year to meet its needs.

Speaking just weeks before the 70th anniversary of the NHS’s founding, he reiterated calls for an immediate UK-wide 1p National Insurance rise to pump extra cash into the health service.

Mr Brown, who was prime minister between 2007 and 2010, said: “This is now the worst decade for growth in NHS funding since the 1940s, since the health service was created in 1948.

“Just think of it: we had austerity in the 1940s because of the cost of the world war. We had the crisis in the 1960s because of devaluation.

“We had the problems with the IMF and with the oil price in the 1970s. We had the global financial crash in 2008, but what’s happened?

“This, under the Conservatives in England and the SNP in Scotland, is the worst decade for growth since 1948.”

He added: “That means the NHS is being starved of resources by both the Scottish Government and the UK Government.”

Mr Brown insisted the NHS was “dying on its feet” when Labour took power in 1997, forcing the party to take action by implementing the biggest single tax rise in history – pumping £9 billion extra into the health service.

He said: “The say that the arc of history bends slowly, but it bends towards justice. It doesn’t just bend of its own will – it is because people made a decision to create that National Health Service, and that’s why we have it today.”