Get off the train in Wigan and the first thing you see is a branch of Cash Converters. Turn right, up Wallgate, and you are in a landscape familiar in post-industrial Britain, with many outlets selling either saturated fat, nicotine or alcohol. Life expectancy for men is 12 years lower than in Britain’s most prosperous areas.

If you compare Wigan with the London borough of Camden, where Euston station sits at the other end of a mere two-hour train journey, the statistics are stark. Camden has a higher proportion of children in poor households than Wigan. Yet its numbers for obesity, elderly hip fractures, self-harm and teenage pregnancies are as far below the English average as Wigan’s are above it. It is common to attribute the spectacular discrepancies between life in southern cities and northern towns to the absence of money. But what’s really missing is power. Every time I get off the train in Wigan, where I grew up, I become more and more outraged at the absence of it.

When they finally noticed the discontent raging in places like this, people with power assumed it could be put right using money. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did it through welfare payments. Even now, as she flails around over Brexit, Theresa May wants to do it through a billion-pound bribe to former mining towns. I propose putting it right by giving them power. What’s missing is the power to take decisions about the most important things in their lives: whether a local hospital should close; how often the bins should be emptied; whether a school should be under the control of the local authority or a faceless corporation; where the infrastructure should go that might – just might- attract investment in something other than vape shops and slave-driving sports-goods empires.

What form of constitutional change is best suited to delivering power to English towns such as Wigan? In this part of England – which has seen power drain towards London, wealth flow upwards into the hands of asset holders and technological change driven mainly from abroad – we are going to need something close to regime change to flatten the socio-economic divide between north and south.

The first building block has to be a national industrial strategy. The government claims to have one in the “northern powerhouse”. But in large parts of the actual north, the phrase is regarded as a sick joke. And that’s because there is not really a strategy – only a document setting out vague aspirations. Meanwhile, the “industrial strategy council”, headed by the Bank of England’s visionary chief economist Andy Haldane, is a club of powerless retreads from the era of Blair and David Cameron. All talk of a Green New Deal remains just that. Because there is no intention at the heart of government to use its power to coerce and shape private investment to deliver lasting change and revive the north.

‘In large parts of the north, the phrase ‘northern powerhouse’ is regarded as a sick joke.’ Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

Right now, all 38 of England’s local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) are pointlessly competing with each other to become high-tech hubs in the industries favoured by the government, wasting time and energy. Some even overlap. The perverse result is that nowhere is really allowed to emerge as a power centre beyond London. In the north-west, for example, there are no fewer than four LEPs covering the urban space west of the Pennines, between Crewe, Liverpool, Manchester and Preston. Turf wars have broken out, and as someone who spent their youth traipsing between the rugby league grounds and nightclubs of these towns, I understand why. North-west England has intense local cultures, with enmities stretching from the English civil war to the English Premier League.

The one weapon that’s going to cut through this is city-region governments with the power to levy taxes. They do not need to cover every inch of England. Suburban and rural areas need to be linked to them through transport and communications, and they should be complemented by regional investment banks. And to make it all work, we need something that people on neither the right nor the left in politics feel happy talking about: a regional bourgeoisie. When I covered the million-strong protests in Barcelona, after Madrid cancelled Catalonia’s bid for fiscal autonomy in 2010, we used to joke that the risk assessment should include getting blinded by diamonds. The marches were led by a prosperous local elite as confident in its own wealth and culture as it was mad at the central authority.

In their own venal way, the Manchester and Liverpool elites have created the beginnings of something similar: cities globally oriented via football and property speculation, but prepared to foster “cultural quarters” through low rents for bohemian small businesses, and via the promotion of distinct cultural identities. But we are going to have to do something bigger to the structures of power in England: absorb the LEPs into city regions, and turn the elected mayoral authorities into elected assemblies.

Camden survives and even thrives because London has the Greater London Authority (though it is nowhere near powerful enough) and because Greater London has a political economy with clear dynamics. Wigan, by contrast, is enmeshed in structures that don’t work. Its own borough council is engaged in undeclared guerrilla warfare against the Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, while Manchester city council itself fights Burnham for power and influence wherever it can. A whole chunk of dense conurbation between Wigan and Skelmersdale sits in the “wrong” LEP. If you look at the abysmal rail and tram infrastructure in the north-west, which seems actively designed to prevent the coalescence of powerful city-centric economies, you see the long-term results of not having a powerful regional government centred on a city.

There are huge success stories in both Liverpool and Manchester: higher education, property development, the leisure and cultural sectors, niche tech companies, the pink pound and – increasingly – the Chinese pound. But the absence of a local bourgeoisie with a concept of duty alongside privilege, and a clear centre of political power to deliver on industrial strategy, are glaring.

To revive the north of England is going to take redistribution. We need to be explicit about the need to channel money from the rich to the poor and from the south to the north. Given that, it’s going to be tough. But it’s been tough before. Wigan, and places like it, are depressed now for the same reasons that they were depressed in the 1930s, and no government has been prepared to do what the postwar Labour government did to end the depression: raise wages, build millions of social homes, organise the economy, and make rising social cohesion and public health central to the project, not impossible dreams.

• Paul Mason is a writer and broadcaster on economics and social justice