What exactly informs your view that there maybe a public backlash against lockdowns coming?
Most of the people who might support Sunaks stance were like that pretty much all the way along, its nothing new for them or for certain publications like the Telegraph. They never truly accepted the case for lockdowns, and went through cycles of being forced into relative silence and temporary begrudging acceptance during the very worst of the initial waves, when it was bloody obvious that there was no alternative to strong measures, only to then attempt to rewrite history and go back into denial later on.
I'd say its true that the further removed we become from those desperate first waves, the more the maximum potential can be unleashed for people to indulge in a convenient misremembering and/or misjudging of that period. But I dont think that maximum potential is actually a very big deal, because I believe that the proportion of the population who can genuinely convince themselves that it was all a terrible overreaction that was disproportionate to the threat is not so great, and continues to be dwarfed by the number of people who had a reasonable view of what we faced. And where those attitudes exist, they have long since already been priced into the picture.
So I dont see how those sorts could contribute significantly to a meaningful new backlash against lockdowns of the past. So are you alluding to possible future lockdowns? As per the other thread we conversed in recently, I dont really see how I can evaluate those possibilities properly at this time. Lockdowns were never something people were going to be delighted to welcome with open arms, people acceptance of them was based on an obvious, dramatic peril that people could grasp. I would not want to have to predict public attitudes unless an equivalent peril properly reveals itself again, until we got to see what proportion of people came to terms with it and accept the need for dramatic action all over again. And there are many other forms of far less dramatic measures and adjustments to behaviour that would come first.
I mean there are clues as to what some of the challenges would be. But evaluating those properly without actually knowing the detail of the viral context the new measures were being suggested in response to seems a bit pointless, too detached from any foundations that would force such issues onto the agenda again in the first place. For example we might expect the public response to be different if we were facing a new variant with really obvious potential and a rapidly established reputation for causing great woe in some other countries, compared to if we were facing a situation where its the slow grinding down of the NHS combined with general and covid-specific winter pressures that have pushed things to a dangerous stage the government deemed necessary to respond to. The psychology would vary between those two different scenarios in ways that could make quite a difference to compliance. Especially since the ability to 'cope' with the last 3 or 4 waves without lockdowns would find people struggling to grasp the detail of why the ability to cope this time was so degraded, why a different response was necessary this time. And the governments 18+ month old attempts to change the mood music to one of having moved on, of the pandemic being in the past, of vaccines on their own being enough, would then come back to haunt them.
In the absence of understanding what context any new measures were imposed in, I can only make some broad and obvious comments about how things varied over time in the past. For example the first lockdown was somewhat easier to accept and come to terms with because there was a big shock that shook people from a sense of normality, a fresh tank of willingness to respond to an emergency and do the right thing, some sense of lots of people being in it together, some novelty value. By the second wave and then the arrival of alpha variant + second full lockdown, people found it harder because some of that had worn off, people were wearier, and the winter season made that lockdown especially grim to cope with. And we might have expected any further lockdowns to carry on that trend, but thankfully we didnt get to find out. Actual lockdowns were replaced by other measures, delays to the timetables to remove other measures, and the threat that lockdowns were still being held in reserve as a last resort. And the behaviours the government needed to encourage were able to be simplified, eventually down to little more than 'get your vaccines when asked on each occasion deemed necessary'. And such things have faded even further from view since then. I'm a 'never say never' person so I cannot convincingly claim that all of those things are certainly gone for good, but I also dont intend to hype up the prospects of their loud return unless we start to find ourselves more obviously in a situation that demands that sort of response and mood music to return. Maybe I'll be able to say something different in a month or three, but hopefully not.
