Ed Miliband unveiled Labour’s plans to hand “historic” new economic powers to towns, cities and regions yesterday.

A future Labour government will appoint regional ministers to oversee an agenda for jobs and growth in every locality.

The policy will be based on recommendations from leading Blairite Lord Adonis, who Mr Miliband has charged with drawing up the party’s strategy for economic growth.

The peer, who chairs right-wing Labour faction Progress, proposed doubling government funding to city and county regions, giving them control over more than £20 billion over the five years of the next Parliament.

Cities and towns that agree to come together with local businesses to plan their economic future will be given “historic new powers over funding for infrastructure, skills and economic development,” said Mr Miliband.

“So today, shadow chancellor Ed Balls and I have written to every local government leader, every local enterprise partnership and every university asking them to work together and prepare for the next

Labour government as part of our plan to close Britain’s productivity gap.”

In a speech in Birmingham, Mr Miliband laid great emphasis on creating private-sector jobs.

But he ignored the desperate need for a major expansion of the decimated public sector.

And he risked further alienating eurosceptic voters by insisting that the way to protect British exports is to stay in the EU.

Mr Miliband declared that Britain, the country of the industrial revolution, had ignored the lessons of its own history for far too long,

“The country that once built its prosperity on the great towns and cities like Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and Cardiff has become a country which builds its prosperity far too much in one city — London,” he said.

Britain would never tackle the cost of living crisis and create the essential new private-sector jobs “unless we break this pattern and reverse a century of centralisation.”