WE live in a deeply divided country. The gap between wealth and poverty has never been so pronounced.

We live in a country where financial speculators who gamble with our economy are rewarded with excessive incomes many of us could not make in a lifetime.

Our economy, politics and public investment are all tailored towards maintaining an over-reliance on the financial sector of the City of London. This has led to vast regional inequality, with Britain being home to nine out of 10 of northern Europe’s poorest regions.

Our northern regions, once the engine room of our country’s prosperity, have been scarred by generations of deindustrialisation, unemployment and lack of investment.

The government’s promise to rebalance the economy has never materialised. There is no better illustration of the gap between the rhetoric and reality than the failure to support our steel industry.

The loss of steel production would cement the decline in British manufacturing and undermine our long-term competitiveness.

I want to see the same commitment to British manufacturing as we saw to banks during the financial crisis to ensure that thousands of jobs dependent on the steel industry are not lost to short-term factors, such as Chinese steel dumped on the market, driving down prices.

There is a role for government to support our manufacturing sector and reverse the decline which has seen manufacturing dramatically fall as a share of economic output from 27 per cent in 1970 to just 10 per cent today.

The loss of manufacturing has a wider impact, not only reducing the number of skilled jobs in our economy, but also cutting investment in research and development which is almost exclusively based in our manufacturing sector.

We need a government committed to supporting British manufacturing, which means more than platitudes, with changes to public procurement away from the short-term, lowest-bidder approach to maximising social benefit and supporting domestic industries.

A revival of manufacturing in our industrial heartlands is only possible if government rhetoric is matched by infrastructure investment.

The current disproportional investment directed towards London will only exacerbate regional inequalities.

Institute for Public Policy Research North found that London received 24 times more transport infrastructure investment per head than north-east England.

In fact, a single project, Crossrail, is earmarked to receive nine times more funding than all the rail projects in northern England’s three regions combined.

Even when it comes to projects such as HS2, considered to be of national importance, regions like north-east England have been excluded.

In fact, a consultation by Network Rail suggested that only 11 minutes would be cut from journey times between Durham and London, while we would lose direct services to major Scottish cities.

Connectivity to major national lines as well as within our own region continue to be a problem.

While money is no object in relation to Crossrail, north-east England is running a Metro service starved of investment with an increasing number of faults as some of our trains approach 40 years old.

However, the extension of this service across the region would have a much greater transformative impact than HS2.

The failure to rebalance the economy does not only create inequality between the regions, but within London itself there is a stark contrast between the wealthiest and poorest within the capital.

The economic pull of London and south-east England draws in education and skills from the regions.

For every graduate who moves from London to the north, 12 travel in the opposite direction. This migration deprives the regions of the skills and training required to help grow our economy, but also leads to overcrowding in London, driving up house prices and rents and affecting quality of life in the capital.

The transformation required to rebalance our economy requires nothing short of a new industrial revolution.

We need to redesign our economy with the clear social and economic objective of rebuilding our industrial base in order to address the worrying insecure, low pay, zero-hours economy created over recent years.

The government speaks of a “northern powerhouse” as an abstract concept, which even ministers cannot define.

We do not need any more slogans but real solutions, such as the national investment bank proposed by Jeremy Corbyn.

The new national investment bank would be tasked with funding vital infrastructure in education, transport and housing as well as providing funding directly to industry in order to develop the modern manufacturing and high-skill technology careers which are currently missing in our regional economies.

The national investment bank’s principal aim would be to create full employment through higher-waged and better-skilled jobs.

It would end the current focus on financial services which has overheated London’s economy at the expense of the rest of Britain.

The bank would facilitate access to local finance as we seek to replicate the success of the German Lander model which has sustained manufacturing and German industry, making them world leaders.

These policies may sound radical but it shows the deficiency of our politics that such a modest proposal for real investment in our regional economies can be characterised as extreme.

Unfortunately, five years of austerity has conditioned us to expect little from our politicians. However, Corbyn’s election is an opportunity to transform our politics, renewing hope and making people expect more from our politicians.

A new economic and industrial policy which rejects the political austerity consensus has been long overdue.

It is the only option if we are ever to see our industrial heartland renewed for the 21st century, with the quality jobs and skills required to sustain our communities into the future.

• Grahame Morris is Labour MP for Easington.