I agree that we're never going to totally irradicate this, but the UK government has consistently opened up too much, too quickly and then responded to the wave

I agree that we're never going to totally irradicate this, but the UK government has consistently opened up too much, too quickly and then responded to the wave of new cases too slowly. The goal of the lock downs wasn't just to prevent excess deaths due to hospital capacity, it was to prevent deaths due to COVID until we had the systems in spread to stop the worst of the outbreak - that is testing capacity, track and trace, and the vaccine.