LABOUR’S shadow business secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey has ridiculed the empty promise of the Tories’ much-vaunted Northern Powerhouse project.

At the northern TUC conference in Newcastle on Saturday, she compared the long time it takes to travel by rail between two northern cities with the journey between London and Greater Manchester.

She said: “It takes me two hours to get from Salford to London.

“It took me three-and-a-half hours to get from Salford to Newcastle today — less than half the distance. The Northern Powerhouse is complete rubbish when they cannot link two northern cities.”

The Salford & Eccles MP condemned the Tories’ “managed decline” of northern industrial centres and pointed out that Britain now has “the worst regional inequality in the whole of the Europe.”

Promising a radical alternative from Labour based on a comprehensive industrial strategy, she said: “You cannot just tinker about with the economy.”

At the root of the strategy would be the aim of delivering the “best possible life for people.”

She pledged that the strategy would include involvement of trade unions as “vital players to create a vibrant economy.”