We’re twelve years into a Tory government. Periodically the ruling party will do something that makes you think they and their cronies might have hit their maximum capacity for cruelty. Each time, somehow, they prove you wrong.

Last week’s mini budget was one such moment. In terms of measures to support households during the worst cost of living crisis in decades, it was a black hole. Obvious, sensible policies being called for elsewhere—a bigger windfall tax on the energy companies, for example, or a rent freeze—were ignored in preference for tax cuts for the richest, for scrapping the bankers’ bonus cap, and for a reversal to the planned rise in corporation tax. With evictions for rent arrears at record levels, millions rationing their food, and the winter months closing in on a country afraid to touch its thermostats, it was a resurrection party for a zombie trickle-down model at the worst possible moment.

The markets appeared to agree, and bolted. But Truss and Kwarteng haven’t doubled back. Instead, they’ve doubled down, and started to look for ways to ‘reassure’ the markets by reducing government spending elsewhere, attempting to give those tax cuts some veneer of ‘responsibility’. Government departments have been tasked with finding ‘efficiencies’, an unsubtle code for a revival of the austerity that contributed to an estimated 130,000 excess deaths last decade. Now also in the firing line as a potential cost-cutting opportunity are benefits.

Asked this week, Kwarteng said it was ‘premature’ to say whether benefits will be raised in line with inflation come April. Chief secretary to the Treasury Chris Philp also declined to rule out a cut. With CPI inflation still running above nine percent and RPI above twelve, failure to do so could mean a drastic real-terms reduction to the rates depended on by low-paid and part-time workers, people out of work, families with children, and people with disabilities and long-term illnesses, among others, to survive.

Not that such attacks are unheard of. Claimants went through a real-terms cut this April, seeing benefits uprated by the September inflation figure of 3.1 percent when it was already predicted to hit above seven. In fact, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) notes that the government has cut the real-terms value of benefits in seven out of the last ten years. Those on Universal Credit saw £20 a week in payments stripped away after the pandemic, the single biggest overnight reduction to social security levels ever. The bankers’ budget also saw Kwarteng promise to deepen the sanctions facing Universal Credit claimants, hitting those in low-paid and part-time work, and making a failing system even worse.

And outside these growing attacks, the rates—for people on both Universal Credit and legacy benefits—are already too low. The standard rate of Universal Credit for an individual over 25, for example, is just £77 a week, a seventh of average weekly earnings. In 2019, three in ten disabled people lived in poverty. As Linda Burnip has written previously in Tribune, disabled people are often hit hardest by rising energy prices, spending more time in the home and sometimes relying on energy-intensive special equipment. Cuts to benefits at any time are cruel; faced with our current crisis, cutting them to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest is, as the JRF put it, ‘morally indefensible’.

Right now, this is speculative. But a real-terms cut would be entirely in keeping with the Tory projects of the last decade. Warning bells have already come suggesting the resurgence—not only from Kwarteng, but from the likes of Suella Braverman and Therese Coffey—of 2010s rhetoric about ‘scroungers’, to the extent that it ever left. The renewal of austerity politics (to the extent that it ever left) will try to deepen the demonisation of those who dare use the public services and state support to which they are entitled. Whether the rhetoric will stick this time remains to be seen—as Tom O’Grady told Tribune earlier in the year, public attitudes to welfare have softened considerably since the 2010s—but a Tory Party clinging on by its fingernails seems set to give it a go.

The consequences, of course, will be brutal. The cost of living crisis is already a permanent state for many in this country, and the Resolution Foundation suggests uprating benefits by earnings instead of inflation would leave a typical working couple on Universal Credit over £1,000 worse off. The JRF says that change would be the new biggest single permanent real-terms cut to benefits in history.

These are not changes people in this country can afford. To recount a few headlines: half of all children in single-parent families live in relative poverty; workers like nurses—plenty of whom also claim Universal Credit—are already using food banks to survive; those food banks are worried about running out of food to give as the individuals who might usually make donations fear for their ability to put meals on their own tables. No government can genuinely think the answer to this is taking more money away from normal people. They’re funnelling money upwards while they can.

Journalists have been writing stories like this for years now. We know who the culprits behind these attacks are, who the beneficiaries are, who suffers and how badly. We know that benefits need not only to maintain their current level, but to be increased, and soon—and we know that without that change, come winter, people will die. Those in power can’t be allowed to get away with it yet again, to tell a story of the great sacrifices required by the many while security and warmth are turned further into a luxury to be enjoyed by a select few.

If you can, join Enough is Enough’s rallies this weekend, and help channel those years of anger into some real action. It’s long past time for things to change.