SCOTTISH Labour leader Jim Murphy pitched his party’s election manifesto yesterday squarely at “the Scottish working class” with a pledge of £1 billion in NHS spending increases.

Launching his programme in the heart of Glasgow’s East End, Mr Murphy appealed to Labour’s traditional voters across Scotland in a bid to hold back the massive surge of the SNP in the polls.

He said: “The big idea running through our plan is that Scotland succeeds when working-class Scots succeed.

Nationalism did not create the NHS or a welfare state, nationalism did not establish the rights of working people, nationalism did not transform the housing conditions of Scotland’s cities.

“All of that was done by Labour governments and, more often than not, it was opposed by the Scottish nationalists who now seek to steal these clothes.”

Mr Murphy announced plans for 500 more GPs for the NHS in Scotland in addition to the 1,000 extra nurses already promised, a £200 million fund to help cancer patients and another £200m for improving mental health treatment.

This would be funded by the £1bn the party said would come to Scotland from its mansion tax on properties worth £2m and above — most of which would be raised in the south of England.

He also pledged 100 new breakfast clubs in primary schools in the poorest parts of Scotland, a job or training place for all young people at risk of becoming long-term unemployed and the abolition of zero-hours contracts.

He hailed the manifesto as Labour’s most radical since 1945 — when the NHS was set up — and added: “I’m proud to say the party of John Smith and Donald Dewar is back in business.”

But SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon warned that “on its own, Labour is not going to be bold enough to offer a real alternative to the Tories.”

Nicola Sturgeon said people across Britain “will not forgive Ed Miliband if he turns down the chance to lock the Tories out of Downing Street.

“That’s why SNP MPs are so important, so we can hold Labour to account, keep Labour honest and make Labour bolder than it will be on its own.”