There are, however, surveys that do provide some insight (see, for example, Jackson and Bradford 2021; Foad et al. 2021; and Halliday et al. 2022) and amongst their more surprising findings is that instrumental considerations – that is, personal fear of the virus or of coercion by the State – may have been relatively unimportant in driving compliance with the lockdown rules. Instead, they found that, in general, people followed the rules because (1) they were the law and (2) because they provided us with a shared understanding of what was good and right to do, which many of us seem to have internalised (Jackson and Bradford 2021).

The first of these is not particularly surprising. The law enjoys a ‘reservoir of loyalty’ amongst Brits who are therefore already predisposed to respect its edicts just because they have been made law (Halliday et al. 2022, p.400).

This, however, does not explain the second driver of compliance. That is, it does not explain why we bought into lockdown laws and willingly accepted them as the basis of our public morality – to the point that we even often justified our non-compliant behaviours as nonetheless remaining within the ‘spirit of the law’ (Meers et al. 2021). It does not explain why we looked upon the sanitised, terrorised redrawing of society and saw that it was good. It is worth briefly revisiting, with the benefit of cooled heads and hindsight, what exactly this looked like.

[This will be the subject of sociological research for decades to come, and not necessarily all for good purposes. My personal observation would be that people in a novel crisis look first to authority rather than principle, an instinct exploited by authoritarians of all stripes. That is why everything gets painted as an acute emergency, whether it’s climate change, Peak Oil, election integrity, and so on. A new coronavirus is more clearly a real emergency when it spreads as rapidly as this one did, but that doesn’t mean than authoritarians didn’t attempt to exploit it for their own power. That’s an expensive lesson learned. — Ed]