This started off as a short reply. Sorry
I wouldn't confuse incompetence and greed with an unwillingness to implement right-wing policy. There has been, and increasingly will be, a strong desire to pander to ultra-conservative values to get them out of a sticky political situation caused, admittedly, by that same incompetence and greed.
I think for a start the various freedom-curbing spy cop and public order bills, and the Rwanda deportation policies (so catastrophically inhuman they can't get approved on legal grounds) are clear, inarguable, evidence of recent right-wing policy.
Now, one might argue that true conservatism is libertarianism and therefore the curbing of free speech and civil liberties isn't inherently right-wing, which is
definitely an argument I would have sympathy with. The problem is that libertarianism can only go so far, can only funnel wealth and privilege in one direction so far, until the capitalist system sucks everything out of the tank and it running on fumes. That's when the state gets co-opted by business interests to give them a helping hand whilst distracting increasingly disenfranchised citizens by making them look elsewhere: a traitorous enemy within. Jews, lefties, people who identify as a gender other than that assigned at birth, etc, etc. There are numerous books and other media about the numerous German and US companies did very well out of their collaboration with the leadership of 1930s and 1940s Germany. Some of them are major players today because of it.
This cycle happens every few generations and it's called fascism. I don't throw this term around glibly or as an insult, it's the definition of what happens when there isn't enough capital to go around to support capitalism. The lectures of Professor Richard Wolff are extremely illuminating and eloquent when it comes to understanding this phenomenon. We are extremely close to this tipping point again.
I don't actually believe that there is anything particularly right-wing about fascism. Nor do I think there is a particular desire amongst conservative, traditional right-win politicians themselves, to actually implement it. The problem is that it tends, certainly in Western 'democracies', to be the creation of the very business interests who back the libertarian politicians, both with campaign funds, outright bribes, and by helping tip the scales towards their parties of choice with their outright dominance of the print media. It's the same political classes who helped them out for decades who are happy to go the extra mile whenever they are asked - because incrementally it's no big deal. It's only when you take a step back and notice that, for example, wages in the US in the 1970s were comparatively higher (adjusted for inflation) than they are now, despite decades of many-fold corporate growth, that you realise what has been given up by the people we elect to represent us.
(It is no coincidence that almost every newspaper could be considered either conservative or extremely conservative, especially those with the highest readerships, and the mainstream paper considered to be the most left-wing, the Guardian, is really firmly centrist.)
So, profit margins need to be preserved. Growth needs to be maintained. Dividends to shareholders must continue. Once the owners of the capital push their pet politicians beyond the point where simple libertarianism can no longer help them, what can they do? There are limits to the extent to which you can deregulate - though Truss came quite close to finding this limit. All they can do is make politicians get creative about how they justify funnelling increasingly expensive (to the public purse) capital into the hands of those who already have the most.
And that's what we're being faced with now. People are being rabidly incited to pit themselves against each other on fabricated non issues like drivers vs non-drivers, 15-minute cities, invented meat taxes, gender-critical ideology. The list goes on. We need to ask ourselves why we are being encouraged by our political leaders to do so. It's no coincidence that it's got so bad now that, as I say, the economy is running on fumes.
We have been talking about right and left wing ideologies; but even as I type this I'm persuaded that they don't actually apply anymore. They work best as descriptors in a moderate, balance, unmolested (by big business) society where you can have a bit more right (e.g. more deregulation) or a bit more left (e.g. strong unions) of the sort we have not known for decades. Right and left cease to exist when you get close to the event horizon, which is where we are now. Governments (red and blue) have gone so far to the right that they are no longer making traditional left/right ideological choices, it's simply about survival in the face of being replaced, by their handlers, by people who will do what they are 'supposed' to if they won't.
It should be based on facts rather than ideology?
