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Opponents of lockdowns predate the introduction of vaccine mandates.
The vaccine mandates target this group, not the lockdowns.
The disastrous state of the economy is due to the Covid response, so yes, that's why they lost the election as badly as they did.
Which only shifts the question to why constituents wanted lockdowns in the supposedly government-not-wanting-lockdown UK, while those in Sweden didn't want lockdowns. If the answer is the media, then why did the media not push Sweden into lockdowns? At some point, there needs to be some explanation for why the UK did this policy while some of our peers did not, and the most credible explanation is that the government wanted to do it. Maybe not all MPs, maybe not all in government, but a large enough proportion were able to use their powers to ramp up fear and then offer to resolve that fear with lockdowns.
The alternative explanation is that everyone just woke up one day in mid-March after dreaming up an entirely new suite of policies that they wanted, for no reason, and therefore the government had to do these policies, because there's no proposed mechanism here for why the public would organically desire this policy after never even suggesting it for Hong Kong Flu, Asian Flu, HIV, Swine Flu, and countless other smaller epidemics.
And if they don't want to be seen as cartoon villains, all they had to do was not do lockdowns.
Internal discussions on deliberately increasing fear predate the lockdowns. "The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging" This is just what was openly published, too.
Again, you're confusing me saying vaccine mandates were targeted at dissidents with me saying lockdowns were targeted at dissidents. They're two different policies, and I never claimed the latter.
Committing monstrous crimes against humanity because you're scared that a public that despises you anyway will despise you is not a coherent explanation for their behaviour. If they are scared of being voted out, see my prior comments on how the government clearly isn't maximizing for popularity. Their position on immigration is enough to explain that. If they are scared of something more dramatic like being murdered, then their concern should be the growing number of Islamists in the country due to their immigration policy, not that Doreen, 72, retired civil servant is suddenly going to turn into a killer because she's scared of the spicy flu. And in terms of how they acted, the only group that ever seemed to scare them was anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protesters, judging by how violently they reacted towards them compared to e.g. BLM protesters.
Ok, so you would roughly agree lockdowns were driven by fear then?
But then why would you think the government needs vaccine mandates to target and purge anti-lockdown activists? It simply can. As you point out Parliament is sovereign. It can just pass a law to lock em up or use anti-terror mandates it doesn't need a convoluted vaccine mandate which only really applied to healthcare workers to then purge anti-lockdown activists. It doesn't make sense. Plus they didn't actually purge them!
As for dates, prior to March the Government was already getting huge criticism. Including letters from hundreds of scientists being published in the media.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.voanews.com/amp/science-health_coronavirus-outbreak_boris-johnson-steps-plans-tackle-coronavirus-criticism-mounts/6185847.html
Once they have decided to change tack, then messaging to increase compliance will be used. That's SOP. But it doesn't mean that is WHY they changed tack. Pressure was mounting through Feb and into March and Boris had already gone stricter and stricter as you can see above.
The pressure was coming from voters and the media.
The reason I think its important to understand that is not to absolve government of blame. Because whatever the pressures, they could have chosen otherwise. Their reasons for doing so, don't impact on the morality. But rather because when the next crisis happens in 15 or 20 years with a new crop of politicians perhaps of different parties, then you might think it won't happen again. But as long as the same public and media pressures are brought to bear, and incentives for politicians remain the same I am telling you it will. Whether it is Labour or Tories or Lib Dems, or the Reform Party in charge.
For the same reason why they needed to promote fear to carry out lockdowns: The public wouldn't tolerate them without the prior propaganda efforts.
I should have clarified this earlier, but when I said vaccine mandates were motivated by the opportunity to politically purge the opposition, this most clearly applies in the US, where vaccine mandates got way further than they did in the UK, mainly because our third round of covid restriction attempts collapsed from the partygate scandal. It's a shibboleth for being red tribe, and blue tribe leaders wanted to hurt the political prospects and economic power of red tribe by removing many of them from well-paid or prestigious employment or at least forcing them to betray their principles to remain employed. But then the conversation drifted to why lockdowns happened in the UK rather than the support for vaccine mandates in the US. But I'm sure you can understand why the idea of unvaccinated healthcare workers is especially corrosive to the government's narrative on covid and vaccines. That's still a political purge, just of the healthcare system first.
Ok we have a problem here, your comments about the government wanting to purge anti-lockdownists, and the papers you provided were all from the UK. But now you are saying actually that is only really in the US?
So are you conceding that the UK government actions were likely not motivated by trying to purge political opponents? And we already established the lockdowns weren't.
And then applying your argument to the US also runs into problems because Covid restrictions there were generally state based not Federal, and they didn't particularly have what the UK had in lockdowns overall. So when you said the vaccine mandates were targeting anti-lockdown people, then you are mixing two different countries. Covid restrictions in the US were very light-touch overall compared to the lockdowns in the UK. And varied state by state and were more severe in Blue cities. If they were targeting Reds that would not be the pattern we would expect to see.
It just seems that you are trying to weave a narrative across different nations with different responses and governance systems in different places and as a result it ends up as an incoherent mess, of who is supposed to be purging who for what reason. I live in the US and the harsher restrictions I had here were mainly from the city not the state or Federal government. And that meant it almost exclusively targeted urban people. If their goal was to purge the Red tribe, for a start they would actually have to find some to purge, and secondly their restrictions put much more of the bulk of compliance on the Blue tribe itself because of that. If they were specifically wanting to disadvantage Reds you would see lesser restrictions where more Blues were (because they were actually not scared, but just trying to hurt the outgroup, so no need to disadvantage the in group) and more (imposed from above) where more Reds were, but that isn't what happened.
The problem here is a conversation about vaccine mandates being motivated by political purges in the US soon turned into one about the motives for lockdowns, a separate policy, in the UK, a separate country. This is because you mentioned "Conservative UK Boomers" and their calls for lockdowns, then I responded to that, perhaps without making clear enough that I don't think the same applies to the UK and the US. Mainly because vaccine mandates never got very far in the UK.
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