The “Red List” is truly the most unforgivable policy; many European countries have no such red list, or don’t apply quarantine to vaccinated individuals. The number that mandate hotel imprisonment quarantine under any circumstances is about 1 or 2 at last check, and even they may have stopped.
We can presumably agree that there is a gradient of risk; a “most risky” rest-of-world country, and a “least risky” red list country. The former has light touch measures and is open for holidays and nonessential travel; the latter requires £2,000, 10 nights’ isolation, with no guaranteed access to the outdoors, and the risk of further hotel isolation if you test positive on day 8 (for a potential of 18 nights in total), even if you travelled to see a dying relative.
But don’t worry, because only an idiot would take part in managed quarantine, because there’s an alternative by cooling off in a “third country”, which you’re definitely the first person in the world to think of and is in no way encouraged by government policy, and it’s now new and improved as it requires no testing whatsoever pre-departure. So someone could bring in a supposed variant of concern that justifies such draconian measures due to the lack of testing after the 10-day cool-off. And worst of all, the opposition is nowhere to be seen in condemning the Red List, in part because they spent much of the year banging the “puny borders” drum themselves and pushing the fiction that we could have “kept out delta” for political reasons.
If it were truly about risk and not xenophobia, we’d make anyone who had visited a festival quarantine in a hotel for 10 days (because that’s probably more risky than the average of any country); and obviously anyone who tests positive as they’re a confirmed risk, and especially anyone who returns from any foreign country who tests positive, and absolutely especially anyone who returns from a foreign country and whose positive test is sequenced as a VoC. But acceptance of endemicity only seems to apply domestically, and people don’t support dehumanising £2,000 quarantines when they think they could apply to themselves.