But of course there would have been many other consequences. The messaging and unlocking plans would have been different, tuned towards treatments as the light at the end of the tunnel instead of vaccines, and a range of other ideas about how infections could have been kept to a lower level. In the pre-vaccine era we saw a few of those from government - during first lockdown they settled on going on about mass testing and contact tracing as a means to cope in future, as a reason for people to expect the future to be less grim. We found out quite quickly after that lockdown ended that they botched that system and oversold how much pandemic weight it could hope to carry, and I expect there would have been more of such stuff if vaccines hadnt come along to take a big chunk of pandemic weight.
Those who oppose the sensible measures, including ones that are far away from full lockdown, would have gone utterly crazy and would be calling more loudly for things which had big implications for getting access to treatment, amount of death, the economy and any remaining sense of solidarity.
Those on the other end of the spectrum would be calling for things that were closer to the 'zero covid' approach than anything this country would have previously taken seriously.
It is pretty hard to say what would have happened under those conditions, and which 'side would have won', but given that even shitty governments cannot ignore the impact on hospitals, its safe to assume that an alternative pandemic exit would not have magically revealed itself.
