Things were better under the last Labour government because Brown spent over tax receipts in top of a cheap credit inflated economy every year from 2001 to 2008. When that cheap credit disappeared, tax receipts collapsed by £200 billion and we were left with liabilities we could no longer fund.
That was the reason for austerity.
Prior to 2001, because of the New Labour pledge to keep to Tory spending plans in their first term, there was no money (there never has been really) for new schools and hospitals, but Labour had promised them. That's why they used PFI, which has strangled the NHS in punative costs ever since.
It's very easy to fund things when you borrow. The problem comes when your income collapses and you've huge liabilities every month, or your repayments become unmanageable. When you looked at all our unfunded liabilities in 2009, including pensions, the situation was far worse than Greece. The only decent thing Brown did was keep us out of the euro, probably because he couldn't have done what he did if we'd been part of the EMU.
I wish Labour had won the 2010 election. They would have had to address the extraordinary economic and financial mess they had made.
Twenty-one years, it took, from 1979 to get the British state budget to balance. We had to go through all the carnage of the 80s, and for what? For Labour to do it all again after 2001.
I left the Labour Party over it in 2005 because I could see what they were doing. You cannot make wholesale, stable changes within society by creating liabilities that you cannot fund long term. We were told "things would get better". What we got was an enormous party that few of us were invited to, and we've ended up with the bill.