©Michele Monticello Essay  all photos ©Michele Monticello

Modern politics has become a cycle of blame. One government blames the previous government, one political party blames another, and every new administration explains the problems it inherited rather than taking responsibility for creating solutions. The public is constantly told who caused the problem, but far less often who is going to fix it. If a business operated this way, it wouldn’t survive. Successful organisations cannot spend years blaming competitors, previous management or market conditions. Eventually, someone has to take responsibility, make decisions and deliver results.

As Alan Sugar would probably say: “You’re fired.”

Of course, a country is not a business. Citizens are not customers, and governments exist to do far more than generate profit. They must balance prosperity with fairness, security with freedom, and opportunity with responsibility. But there is one lesson politics could learn from successful organisations, accountability matters. Good intentions are important, but they are not a substitute for results. Democracy depends on people having opinions, and rightly so. We should question our leaders, challenge decisions and hold governments to account. The problem is that modern politics often rewards the narrative more than the outcome.

Political parties have become highly skilled at explaining why problems exist, defending their own record and identifying someone else to blame. The public is naturally drawn into these competing narratives until politics becomes less about solving problems and more about deciding whose version of events to believe. When blame becomes the currency of politics, responsibility quietly disappears. Perhaps that is why public trust has declined so sharply. It is not simply that people disagree with one another. It is that many no longer believe those asking for their vote truly know how to solve the problems they inherit.

As a result, society divides itself into opposing camps, convinced that the left has the answers or the right has the answers. But what if neither does? Perhaps one of the greatest mistakes in modern politics is believing that changing ideology automatically changes outcomes. History seems to suggests something different. One generation creates a system to solve the failures of the previous generation. Eventually that system develops weaknesses of its own, and the next generation replaces it with something else. We swing between state ownership and privatisation, between higher taxation and lower taxation, between regulation and deregulation, always believing the next model will finally solve the problems the last one could not. Yet perhaps the real issue has never been ownership.

Perhaps it has always been governance. One of the clearest examples of this is the debate surrounding Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation programme. It has become common to argue that privatisation was the beginning of many of Britain’s current problems, but that overlooks an important fact, privatisation itself was a response to failure.

Many state owned industries had become inefficient, heavily subsidised, politically constrained and increasingly expensive for taxpayers to support. The decision to rivatise was not made because the existing system was succeeding. It was made because many believed it had stopped working and in many respects, privatisation achieved what it set out to achieve.

Companies became more efficient. Investment increased. Businesses grew stronger. It worked? at least, it worked for shareholders. Which raises an important question. If those businesses became successful, should society have continued to share in that success? Perhaps the greatest consequence of privatisation was not that ownership transferred from government to the private sector. Perhaps it was that the public stopped being owners altogether and became only customers and that is a very different thing.

Maybe the answer was never complete state ownership or complete private ownership. Perhaps the better model sits somewhere between the two. Imagine a system where businesses remain privately managed, professionally led and commercially driven, while the public retains a meaningful long term stake through a national investment fund or strategic shareholding.

Government would not run businesses. It would invest in them. The financial crisis of 2008 raises exactly the same question. When major banks faced collapse, taxpayers stepped in because the consequences of failure would have devastated the wider economy. The public accepted the risk and once those institutions recovered, most of the long term rewards flowed back into private ownership. Should taxpayers have remained long term investors after carrying the greatest risk?

Perhaps government should think less like an operator and more like a steward protecting the national interest while allowing professionals to manage commercial success. The same principle may apply to government itself. Leadership should never be about ideology alone. Nor should it simply reward those most skilled at winning elections. The people entrusted with running a country should demonstrate the ability to lead, organise, solve problems and deliver results. Those skills can come from business, education, science, engineering, public service or countless other walks of life.

What matters is not the profession. It is competence. Perhaps that is where politics has drifted furthest from the expectations we place on every other profession. We expect pilots to know how to fly. Surgeons to know how to operate. Engineers to know how to build. Should we not expect those entrusted with governing a nation to demonstrate the same level of competence before taking responsibility for its future?

Maybe that is the question we should begin asking. Not whether the left is right. Not whether the right is wrong. Not whether the state should own more, or whether the private sector should own less but whether we have built a system that consistently finds the most capable people, gives them the right incentives, holds them genuinely accountable and allows the whole country to share in the success it helps to create. Perhaps the greatest failure of modern politics is not that one side keeps getting it wrong. Perhaps it is that we are still arguing about who is to blame instead of asking whether the system itself needs to evolve.