I think I asked this a while back and never got an answer.

It has been answered many times by the government, it always downplays the costs of lockdown and exaggerates the the benefits, to make itself look good.
Can you tell me the benefits of lockdowns vs the economic and human cost.

Who are you asking? I'll give you my opinion, which is that of the WHO: Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer. We in the World Health Organisation do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus. The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.

Boris Johnson has used the current lockdown to buy time to stave off the cases until a vaccine kicks in, and judging by the turn in case growth, it may have just worked, but at great cost, it is impossible to know yet if it has been worth it. If the mid winter peak is passed, and if vaccines keep people safe enough and the lockdown is lifted, then perhaps it is justified. If it is made permanent obvsly it is not the correct thing to do; too costly

What I'm really doing is showing lockdowns do something,

Doing "something" is not "working".
and it is (or may be) possible to predict what they do, in other words it may be possible to calibrate restrictions, in a way that makes it useful for some specific purpose. It would make it possible to design a lockdown, with certain properties, to have an effect on a pandemic that steers it to a better state,maximising the pros while minimising the cons. It might be impossible.

We knew what they did, it was modelled and turned out to be true.
As even SPI-M and IC said, all they do is delay and spike. We knew this.
If this virus is endemic, we will adopt national policies to find a balanced way to live with it.

Its been endemic since February. You live with it by carrying on as normal.

You seem to be arguing for nobody ever returning to normal life ever again, constantly modifying their live and behaviour forever more due to a virus that on the scale of things, isn't very infectious and isnt very deadly.

You're basically asking everyone to surrender forever more to something that almost none of them will be affected by.

You seem to be arguing for nobody ever returning to normal life ever again,

I have not argued for it, since I don't really want it. I'm merely describing what we already do before covid-19, we always adopt national policies to find a balanced way to live with risks, it's called politics. We already accept restrictions on many things that I would prefer to be voluntary. it will be no different with covid-19. I'm sorry if you don't like it ... that's tough.

Once again " cases" should we shut everything down everytime there are " cases" of anything? 11 months to regroup and 11 months to totally change the fabric of society..take away our freedoms..cause untold misery.what has it achieved?a magic vaccine? Chasing a goal of what?yes it was you I was asking. The agenda for all this in my opinion has never been about saving the populations health as the ultimate goal.

should we shut everything down everytime there are " cases"

It's admissions that cause overload in the NHS. If there are too many poorly people, the health system automatically becomes degraded.

Chasing a goal of what?yes it was you I was asking.

They claim they are trying to keep the health system from becoming so overloaded, people start to die from treatable conditions. they want to avoid that.
By doing lockdown last spring, they delayed herd immunity, and now the have a surge in cases/admissions.

The agenda for all this in my opinion has never been about saving the populations health

I can't think of another reason. If the NHS could manage quite well without any intervention, we should let it do so, but they have decided to try to keep people separate to avoid transmission. That's the theory they are using. Cases seem to have peaked now, meaning we should see fewer admissions and deaths in three weeks.