ONLY the oh-so-proper speaking style betrayed that the politician was from a different age – the words sounded bang up-to-date.

It was a recording, played by one news programme, to ram home just how long Governments have been promising to end London’s economic dominance.

There was George Brown, Labour’s deputy leader, vowing to divert investment and wealth to “hard-pressed areas” including the North-East. The recording was from 1963… but it could have been John Prescott in 1997, Lord Heseltine last year, George Osborne last week or Lord Adonis this week.

The Chancellor’s speech needn’t detain us long, with its vague wish for a Trans- Pennine high-speed rail line at some distant date – and no mention of the North-East.

But this week’s effort, by Labour’s Lord Adonis, was far more interesting, not least because so many Labour figures doubt it has the answers to the age-old problem.

At first sight, much in the Adonis package is welcome, with large sums - £6bn a year – to be devolved from Whitehall to local political and business leaders.

Responsibility for housing, business support, back-to-work schemes and skills are on offer, on top of the Coalition’s plans to devolve mainly transport funding (handing over only £2bn). But the ideas drew strong criticism from MPs including Nick Brown (Newcastle East) and Kevan Jones (North Durham) who fear it will fail.

Their remedy is to bring back a slimmeddown development agency, with real financial muscle, rather than overload local councils.

Meanwhile, a plan to allow town halls to keep extra business rate revenues risks widening the rich-poor divide, says Durham County Council’s leader. The last point is a very real concern, but it is hard to see how meaningful devolution can exclude some control over a key income stream such as business rates.

The much bigger fear is that the institutions expected to deliver economic transformation - local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) – are simply not up to the job, in many areas.

These are bodies currently run on a shoestring that are suddenly expected to ramp up to become the “powerhouses” that Labour (and all parties) want?

The truth is there is neither the money to create muscular organisations, able to pull economic strings, nor the appetite for the inevitable criticism that these are costly “bureaucracies”. Neither does any party wish to give the regions tax-raising powers – as opposed to powers to spend existing sums differently.

And all that means the dilemma George Brown raised 51 years ago is unlikely to go away.

YORK lost the battle for Richard III’s bones to Leicester, but MP Hugh Bayley is still fighting. To ministers’ frustration, it seems Mr Bayley requested talks to discuss how the reburial could be done “in a way which acknowledges King Richard’s close association with Yorkshire”. Rejecting a meeting, Simon Hughes, the justice minister, said: “These remains have certainly occupied the attention of the House for a long time already.”