When everyone around you sits on their hands, it’s tempting to take control. While companies refuse to invest and Whitehall is paralysed by Brexit, why not legislate and nationalise to get something done?

Britain is in the midst of an investment crisis, a productivity crisis, an income crisis and an inequality crisis – and all are so entrenched that they are beyond policies that tinker or No 10’s “nudge unit”.

Nudge economics, despite the award this year of a Nobel prize to its main proponent, the American Richard Thaler, is a pathetically weak tool given the scale of the problem.

What’s more, so many of the government’s current policies, nudge or otherwise, are just plain bad. A case in point is the £10bn allocated to the help to buy programme, which is a rare example of big money being thrown at a situation, in this case the one affecting housebuilding.

Help to buy works by giving homebuyers an interest-free government loan worth up to 20% of the value of a new-build property. It was designed by the Treasury and backed by the Bank of England as a way to spur housebuilding across the country.

But a report by Morgan Stanley has found that almost all of the £10bn has gone into the pockets of housebuildding firms, with little evidence that the rate of housebuilding has increased.

Shares in the big building companies have soared, as you might imagine, and the promise of £10bn more from Philip Hammond in next month’s budget has of sent their market values even higher. A year ago, the price of a share in Persimmon, the UK’s second-largest housebuilder, stood at £16. Now it stands just below £29, a 55% rise.

And this obsession with private property goes deeper, as the IPPR Commission on Social Justice found in its report – Financing investment: Reforming Finance Markets for the Long Term. The commission is a cross-party group that includes business people – who run airports, departments stores and investment funds – alongside figures from civil society such as Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, members of charity Citizens UK and a smattering of academics.

It’s not only the government that is obsessed with lending to prop up property owners and developers – the banking sector is keen, too. The report sets out the way UK banks mostly lend abroad, with loans to UK businesses accounting for just 5% of total UK bank assets, compared with 11% in France, 12% in Germany and 14% on average across the rest of the eurozone.

Property loans to businesses and individuals in the UK account for more than 78% of all loans to individuals and non-financial businesses – which means those outside the Square Mile. After stripping out real estate, loans to UK businesses account for just 3% of all banking assets.

As a transmission mechanism for diverting the nation’s savings into worthwhile, productive businesses, the banks fail miserably.

And the rest of the financial sector is just as bad. The IPPR report accused hedge funds, proprietary traders (which use investment bank cash) and high-frequency traders – a group that collectively makes up 72% of trades in on the London market – of paying themselves depending on performance against rivals and over short timescales, “not long-term value creation”.

This spivvy trading arena has the knock-on effect of making short-term demands on the boards of listed companies. Such is the pressure to avoid being caught in traders’ headlights that in a survey of more than 400 executives, some 75% said they “would sacrifice positive economic outcomes” if it helped smooth their profit figures from one quarter to the next.

The report argues that this self-absorbed world of stock market trading needs to support longer-term investment in a way that also benefits savers and business owners.

Some of the solutions it puts forward are all well worth pursuing, including a move to scrap the little-known “market maker” relief on stamp duty reserve tax. This would effectively be a first step towards a financial transactions tax to reduce short-term speculative trading, while also raising at least £1.2bn a year by 2020.

The commission goes on to say that the funds raised should be used to introduce new reliefs in capital gains tax and corporation tax to encourage the longer-term ownership of shares.

Yet, that £1.2bn qualifies as not much more than a nudge in the right direction. It won’t satisfy those who demand that a leftist government should go beyond encouragement and nationalise the commanding heights of the economy, from the energy companies to the railway franchise holders, and tackle the banking sector by funding new investment vehicles, national and regional, to bridge the gap between high finance and small and medium-sized businesses.

Labour already has many of these policies in its manifesto, and some at the top of the party plan to go further. Fortune favours the brave, they say.

Could it be though, that while the commission appears timid, its aim of achieving a broad consensus for policy initiatives means it has a better chance of long-term success? It is frustratingly accurate when it portrays Britain’s economy as a supertanker. Hoping it will react like a dinghy to a hard push on the tiller is wishful thinking.