Yup. They bought the tabloid bullshit of benefits scroungers and immigrants ruining the country and happily voted Tories time and again because Labour would just "hand more of our hard earned tax money to the lazy scroungers".

It's the same way high-earning people see themselves as "working hard for their money" not recognising that someone working 40 hours a week stacking shelves might actually be working a damn sight harder than they are.

We had problems with unemployment and housing and such even before austerity, however when the 2008 global financial crisis hit thanks to the banks the Tories campaigned on the mantra that it was our reckless borrowing that caused the crash... not the complete failings in regulation that allowed it to happen across the world. They told us austerity was the only solution - we'd lived it large on other peoples money, buying houses and cars on finance... and now it was time to tighten our belts and come back down to earth. It's all bullshit, but much like Brexit it sounds pretty good when you plaster that single sentence on the side of a bus right?

So we got a decade of austerity and them stripping back public services and basically leaving the poorest in our country to fend for themselves, which led to a decade of us basically stagnating and very little bounce back / growth since the last recession.

Now we're at the next recession and we throw Brexit into the pot and COVID on top of that and suddenly a very large portion of the country are finding themselves facing the reality that many millions of people already had to live in for years thanks to the Tories and the people who voted them relentlessly... but they don't feel these hardships should apply to them this time because they have a nice house and two cars and a holiday every year and they'd like to keep it that way, thank you very much.