The truth is stranger than fiction. Rising out of the chaos of the Brexit vote stand two opposing visions of Britain’s future. There is Britain as the 19th-century free-trade, low-tax warrior, the world’s banker, insurer, and lawyer.

Facts get in the way of visions. In the 19th-century free trade was about strong countries undermining the sovereignty of others. Not the best model for Britain today. Britannia no longer has the world’s most powerful navy to blockade Latin American ports until the locals pay City of London bondholders or push opium onto the Chinese.

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Opposite this free trade myth is ... nothing. “Remainers” are so pinning their hopes on the cavalry arriving at the last minute to rescue them that they have invested little thought on a post-Brexit future.

There is a progressive alternative that is not all aspiration. There are practical policy measures, for instance, that would help to transform our financial sector into one focused on financing the long-term investments necessary to build an economically efficient and socially just alternative to Victoriana. One of these is a regulatory change made possible by Brexit. Another is the modernisation of an old English tax on the churning of assets.

When our entrepreneurs look at a car manufacturer or clothes chain, they see a real estate or pension play. Our business elites live for the clever flip that allows them to buy the superyacht. A certain amount of trading and speculation in the background is useful. It helps us to value things. But when the background becomes the foreground we end up with illusions of value. Our financial markets are bigger in turnover than before, but under stress, they are proving thinner and more vulnerable to flash crashes.

Today’s economic model mirrors the banking model. Bankers view loans as opportunities to earn fees for originating, securitising, trading, settling and clearing. They have shifted the risk of holding the loan to others. They boast that accelerating the speed through which securities circulate reduces costs to consumers and is a measure of their immense contribution to the economy which, they argue, must be preserved post-Brexit, at all costs. But when Thomas Philippon added up the fees paid by the non-financial sector to the financial sector, he found that at 2.0% of finance raised, costs had in recent decades returned to where they were in 1880.

All of the efficiency gains since the steam age, as a result of new technologies, innovation and globalisation have recently been captured by those who run the industry and not shared with consumers. It is one of the largest contributors to worsening income inequality over the past 30 years. Equally important, when the financial sector makes more money from churning than investing, they will do less investing, contributing to a secular stagnation.

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The current economic and banking model is vulnerable to two policy changes. We can amend European regulation (Solvency II) that through capital adequacy requirements not commensurate with the risks faced by long-term savers, incentivises them to invest in short-term government bonds and not make long-term investments. We can modernise and extend the UK’s existing tax on churning – the stamp tax on share transactions. The industry repeats the false idea that the tax doesn’t work so many times that people have stopped seeing what is in front of them. This tax currently raises £3bn a year primarily from foreign owners of UK shares who have not found a way of avoiding it after 322 years of its existence. According to an IMF report, similar taxes collect billions or more from 30 countries.

This is not a tax on where a trade takes place, as an unsuccessful Swedish tax in the 1980s, but on the transfer of the ownership of the security. New tax information agreements and disclosure requirements on beneficial ownership following the global financial crisis make it possible to extend this tax for the first time to derivatives and other securities without fear of relocation of trades. Instead, the UK finance industry has chipped away at this tax over the years to the point where the government loses £1bn a year of potential revenues through exemptions that cover high-frequency traders and hedge funds. In a new Intelligence Capital Paper, I set out the case for extensions and the closing of loopholes that would raise £25bn over the life of a parliament. The money will come in handy. The big prize is the transformation of the economy to where investing trumps trading and finance is the servant of industry, not its master.

Avinash Persaud is chairman of Intelligence Capital