Very well put. There’s no correct blueprint or plan for dealing with a pandemic. You’ll never have a perfect level of balancing the economy and public health in times like this but Johnson’s approach has been reactionary and swinging from ‘stay inside’ to ‘go out and spend’ back to ‘stay inside’ again and repeat a few times over.
One extra point to add to yours is that public compliance to measures is reflective of the trust in what the government is doing to combat the virus. Sweden*, for example, has high levels of public compliance. Their government encouraged but didn’t enforce changes of behaviour and the Swedes went along with it without too much fuss. Boris Johnson lost so much trust with the Dominic Cummings saga that it was not only the American-style libertarian shouts from some that got louder and louder. The scenes at London train stations on Saturday night were evidence of a public that had lost trust in what the government were asking people to do. People were and are doing their own thing now. Selfish we may say, but when trust has been eroded and there’s little faith left in the overall plan (if there is one as it seems to be made up as it goes), can you blame them?
*I’ll take the point that Sweden has actually fallen back in recent weeks and admitted that they have made mistakes too. No system is perfect and there’s has had flaws but it hasn’t had the boom and bust, stop and start, reactionary ‘approach’ we’ve had in England.
