No government, howveer much we dislike them, can really say - ah let's just let this illness kill absolutely everyone it's going to kill. No worries, people won't mind. They have to do something!
Also, don't forget that the original list of shielding wasnt correct. Couple of examples ;
I got the shielding letter on the first day they came out. A friend of mine with the exact same illnesses and medications as me, never got it. So that isn't right.
Family members got theirs 8 weeks into sheilding so again... That's not right.
It was in the news at the very start that approx 800,000 extremely vulnerable people had been missed off the list.
So if that approach had been taken it would have been disastrous.
But my original point is as much as I hate this government.... I think they had to do a lockdown because you can't just say as a PM "I'm going to let a virus kill hundreds of thousands of the population" it's bad enough, extremely bad enough that it's killed as many as it has!