A LABOUR government would invest more than £25 billion creating a second rail link between Brighton and London.

A second Brighton Main Line has been included in the party’s election manifesto unveiled by Jeremy Corbyn yesterday.

The party is also proposing to abolish tuition fees and fracking and to nationalise the railways, water companies and Post Office in plans worth almost £50 billion.

Peter Kyle said it was a “dream come true” to see the second rail line included as a “bold and lasting manifesto” for the city’s hard-pressed rail passengers while the party’s Brighton Pavilion candidate Solomon Curtis hailed it as a manifesto for Generation Y.

However, Brighton-based Tory MEP Daniel Hannan said Mr Corbyn was taking the country back to the 1940s with his level of taxation while the Lib Dems said it was “undeliverable”.

The Labour proposal for a new Brighton Main Line was the subject of a £100,000 government study released in March which said there was “no case” to take it forward for decades.

Mr Kyle said he had been lobbying the shadow transport team and Mr Corbyn to include the rail line which did not feature in last week’s leaked version.

The manifesto also pledges to bring private rail companies back into public ownership as franchises expire, to reverse the privatisation of Royal Mail “at the earliest opportunity” and to replace the “dysfunctional water system” with regional publicly-owned water companies.

In September, for the fourth year running, Southern Water, which supplies the majority of the county’s homes, was named the country’s worst-performing by regulators, with a complaint rate twice the national average.

But Michael Roberts, chief executive of Water UK, said the manifesto did not do justice to the water industry’s record post-privatisation, with more than £130 billion invested since 1990 and a rise in the quality of bathing and drinking water.

The party has also vowed to “protect” small businesses – good news for Brighton and Hove which has the highest proportion of creative SMEs in the country.

The manifesto proposes reintroducing the lower small profits rate of corporation tax, exclude small businesses from quarterly reporting, lowering potential business rate rises, and to establish a National Investment Bank offering £250 billion in loans.

Other boosts to Sussex industries include a £1 billion Cultural Capital Fund to invest in creative clusters, the reinstatement of a cross-Whitehall ministerial group on tourism, the refocus of farming and fishing funds towards smaller traders and allowing EU workers in farming, manufacturing, fishing and food to remain in the UK.

Producers last summer warned leaving the EU could harm West Sussex’s £1 billion fruit industry which is reliant on 4,000 seasonal EU workers.

Labour has also vowed to ban fracking, which has been the subject of several Sussex protests, most notably at Balcombe in 2013.

Green MP Caroline Lucas said Labour had started to catch up with her party’s policies including a new Brighton Main Line.

She added: “But many of us in Brighton will also be looking in vain for what’s missing: policies that really tackle the crisis of climate change, clean up our city’s polluted air, restore publicly owned bus services, reform our broken voting system and stand firm against a hard Brexit.”

Emily Tester, Lib Dem candidate for Brighton Kemptown, said: “The Labour manifesto is a menu without prices and an insult to the intelligence of the electorate.

“By publishing this manifesto, Labour have conceded they will not be forming the next government because it is quite simply undeliverable.”