"If you believe that Labour caused the crisis by being irresponsible and the Tory cuts are the way forward, can I ask where you get your information from?"
PESA data.
I would suggest it is you that doesn't understand what happened between 2001 and 2008, and you that is being manipulated by the so-called "left-wing press".
It was clear by 2005 that Brown's spending levels during a time of "boom" were going to be exceptionally problematic when the boom was over. He indulged in a form of anti-Keynesianism whereby he spent over receipts every single year from 2001 onwards -- and those receipts were clearly inflated by the cheap money that was circulating the globe and pouring into British GDP.
Once that cheap money spigot stopped, as it was always going to do, GDP collapsed, as it was always going to do, and tax receipts collapsed, as they were always going to do. Hence the deficit turned from being a deficit in the tens of billions to a deficit being in the hundreds of billions -- nearly twice the annual cost of operating the NHS in the first post-crisis year.
This was entirely avoidable. In fact, had Brown stuck to 2001 ratios, we would have been sat on a nice little pile in 2008 after the crisis, which would have meant no cuts and money available to cushion the blow of contracting GDP.
And that would have been proper Keynesianism.
Not only that, but in order to stick to their manifesto pledge of sticking to Tory spending plans in their first term, Labour needed to find another way to spend to "prove" their eternal pile of bollocks spin that Tories simply didn't spend money because they hated poor people. Except when they got into power they realised there wasn't actually any money to spend on entirely new hospitals and schools.
So they used capital instead. And the way they did that was by using a tool designed for investment in quasi-goverment-driven commercial enterprises, such as the Channel Tunnel -- that tool was PFI, which was NEVER designed for enterprises where ongoing funding would be provided through state spend.
So now we have a situation where the NHS has to pay the company that now owns the hospital where my MiL works because the Labour government sold it to them £12,000 to widen a doorway by two inches so that it is wheelchair accessible.
And Labour activists talk about Tories privatising the NHS?! It would be hilarious if it wasn't so blind.
"And austerity is a failed, damaging economic policy, rejected by the rest of the world - as explained by a Nobel prize-winning economist"
Paul Krugman is not a Nobel prize-winning economist. There is no Nobel prize for economics. Alfred Nobel never set one up. Instead, Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences, which is not granted by the Nobel Committee.
Austerity is rejected by the rest of the world ... except for the Northern European nations in the EU, the troika and the IMF, which are busy applying slash and burn tactics to Greece, which has fuck all leaway because it is locked into the Euro and the markets will not lend the state any money. Indeed, the IMF loves austerity when it comes to strait-jacketed nations paying back loans.
And Paul Krugman is known for actually suggesting that the best way to solve the US economic depression would be for aliens to invade and cause huge amounts of damage. I am not joking.
Hilariously, considering your opening post, Miliband's pledge is to achieve a budget balance by the end of his first term. Not only that but he pledges to get the national debt falling as soon "as soon as possible in the next parliament".
There is no way in a cat's hell he can do that without significant tax rises and spending cuts.