I can't think of any examples which match Boris's particular characteristics, but people's politics do change! I think it would be massively innacurate to describe Boris as a libertarian now, having seen what he has done in the past year.
The UK doesn't have enough police to enforce the rules, so we don't know how the government would like to police it if they had enough police.
I would say the legislation is incredibly onerous and it would be almost impossible to make it more prescriptive.
Again, this may only be due to low numbers of police.
No one is comparing/equating what we are experiencing to the really barbaric regimes of history or the present day. We are merely making the point that what starts out as something apparently benign and harmless, or even benevolent, can rapidly change into something much darker.
And I am stating that the parallels being drawn fail because they don't take remotely adequate account of the underlying politics of those in government. The "authoritarian" theory of what is happening requires us to believe that the measures currently in place are desired in and of themselves. The evidence for how they have been introduced, implemented, and defended simply does not support that perspective.
I don't see how the government forbidding you from leaving your house can ever be considered minor.
In comparison to similar provisions in democratic states elsewhere, the measures in place here are comparatively minor. As importantly, authoritarian states have a tendency to include a wide range of other measures that seek to control not just where we go, but also what we may see, do, and think.
I do not suggest that it is necessary to like, or even agree with those measures; merely that the language of "authoritarianism" shows a failure to understand the true nature of what authoritarian regimes are really like. And, for clarity, I do not include the likes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or modern day China in that bracket - those states are/were totalitarian, which is a completely different kettle of fish; I recommend reading Orlando Figes (USSR), Ian Kershaw (Germany) or Jung Chang (China) for an understanding of what such regimes are like to live within.
All the discussion about authoritarian rules takes me back to 1989. It comes to an end in the end but it does take a considerable number of people to make it happen. If it did carry on eventually enough people will have had enough. In reality expect this to fizzle out over time.
All of the states that fell in 1989 were firmly in the totalitarian camp.