Billionaire firms that profited from the coronavirus crisis should be hit with a super tax to fund the recovery, a North East MP has said.
Wansbeck MP Ian Lavery said the cash raised could be invested in education, transport and the health service in hard-pressed northern towns and cities.
The former Labour Party chairman told ministers that the cash currently on offer for Boris Johnson's "levelling up" project amounted to little more than a "sticky plaster for a severed limb".
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Mr Lavery, in a House of Commons debate, said: "A child born in poverty in somewhere like Wansbeck constituency, which is the sixth worst area for social mobility in England, will very likely live and die in poverty, through no fault of their own.
"Between 2014 and 20 the North East saw child poverty increase from 25% to 37% and almost two thirds of those children in my constituency living in poverty come from a working family.
"But the government is still pushing ahead with cuts to Universal Credit that will take money out of these family’s pockets and more than £7 million a year out of the local economy."
Mr Lavery went on to cite statics on life expectancy, employment rates, transport spending and inward investment all as markers of the North being ignored by Westminster.
He said: "Levelling up as the government sees it is quite simply to pour steel and concrete into shiny infrastructure projects in communities in the North and the Midlands.
"But there is no plan that exists to tackle the grotesque inequalities that have been allowed to develop over decades in our country."
Mr Lavery called for a "super tax" to better fund public services, he said: "
"During the course of the last eighteen months the global wealth of billionaires rose by more than £5 trillion.
"So, let us have a super tax, backdated when Labour win the next election, on the Spivs and Tory donors who have enriched themselves with government cash, pocketed through the last year of hell whilst ordinary people have paid the price."
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