It really and truly sucks, but, I mean, unfortunately, it's not like they're not wrong....
The best we can hope for is that Europe can unify over this and together with the Commonwealth of Nations, they'll be strong enough to keep up the good fight. But it's definitely a major blow.
This makes intuitive sense to me. If you're rich, the economy getting bad like it did wouldn't have hurt so much - you do pay more but your existing wealth insulates you from most of the actual pain.
And if you're making under 30k then life was already really tough before the economy got bad, so you went from a painful situation that sucked to a slightly more painful situation that sucked.
It's those in the middle who went from comfortable to painful.