INDEPENDENCE would see Scotland face “austerity until doomsday,” Gordon Brown said today.

In a rare intervention, the former prime minister said only Labour could be properly trusted to fund healthcare services north and south of the border.

He spoke out after the pro-market Institute of Fiscal Studies said the blueprint for independence set out by the SNP Growth Commission would lead to “another decade of the sort of restraint on public spending that Scotland is currently experiencing.”

An IFS report stated that, “if this is austerity, then austerity would be extended under the commission's proposals.”

Mr Brown said: “Austerity is here until doomsday if the Scottish National Party is all that is going to confront it.

“Spending on vital services like the health service would rise even slower in the coming decade if we had independence than under the present decade where money has been so short.”

The ex-PM was speaking at a Labour Party rally in Glasgow to mark 70 years of the NHS. The party’s shadow health secretary at Westminster Jonathan Ashworth said that, in contrast to SNP and Tory austerity, Labour’s plans to invest in the English health service “would mean nearly an extra £1 billion for the Scottish NHS.”

Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard vowed that tackling health inequality would be his "overriding mission as First Minister."

He said: “Our goal is not just to be the guardians of the NHS in opposition. Our goal is to be guardians of the NHS in government again.

“The NHS is practical socialism in action and that is our defining ideal as a party.”

Unveiled last month, the Growth Commission’s report explicitly rejected austerity, but critics from both sides of the independence debate have said its vision is too economically conservative.

Mr Brown added: "As far as I can see it, Labour is now the only party standing for social justice in Scotland. It is the only party that can save the National Health Service."