Becky, a healthcare assistant at a hospital in Warwickshire, has childcare demands that mean she can only work part-time. After working through the pandemic and falling ill with Covid twice, she now has to fight what she describes as ‘a constant battle’ to claim Universal Credit in order get by.

‘We’ve only been offered insulting real-terms pay cuts over the last few years, and too many of us are only one delayed or reduced UC payment away from despair,’ she says. ‘The cost of living crisis has only made us more vulnerable to falling into poverty, and rising inflation has left us feeling like there’s no way of catching up.’

Becky is just one of the millions who will be hit if the Tories follow through on their latest idea. Not content with dismantling our public services and ushering in a host of new crises, the government now intends to preside over the largest real-terms permanent cut to the basic rate of benefits ever made in a single year.

Benefits including Universal Credit, Child Benefit, and ‘legacy benefits’ like Employment Support Allowance and Jobseekers’ Allowance are ‘uprated’ each year in April, usually according to September’s CPI inflation rate. This year, however, the government has signalled benefits may be uprated according to earnings rather than CPI. That means a suggested uprating of just 5.4 percent against inflation that hit 9.9 percent in August.

It would be an inhumane policy at any juncture. But it’s all the more sinister in this moment of spiralling costs and widespread anxiety—showing how keen our government is to press the point into those on the cost of living crisis’ sharpest end. That crisis won’t be over by April 2023.

‘The government are out of touch with reality when it comes to people claiming benefits,’ says Kate, from Brighton. She’s currently living in insecure housing and working while claiming Universal Credit, despite her poor health. ‘Universal Credit is simply not enough to survive on. I’m constantly having to borrow money from other family members.’

Sarah, who’s been on Employment Support Allowance for ten years since her mental and physical health declined, is in a similar situation. ‘It’s always been a struggle, especially with no family to rely on,’ she says. After an abusive childhood resulting in enduring mental illness including PTSD, she has no contact with relatives. ‘Over the years I’ve had to borrow. Not having the £20 uplift really affected me: supermarkets were charging ridiculous fees for delivery and then not bringing staples like milk. I ended up going into more debt over the pandemic, as without it I couldn’t survive.’

The idea was initially justified on the basis of needing to make ‘savings’ to fund Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax-cutting agenda. But as others have noted, cutting benefits would cost more in popularity and political capital than it would save in real money—suggesting it’s less to do with funding a budget and more about breathing new life into an old myth that falsely pits ‘hard workers’ against their supposedly ‘scrounging’ counterparts.

This rhetoric has been making a comeback in recent weeks. Tory MP Lee Anderson, for example—the same who stood up in Parliament earlier in the year and said that the reason people use foodbanks is because they ‘cannot budget’—told the BBC that did not seem ‘fair’ to workers facing real-terms pay cuts for benefits to rise in line with inflation. Suella Braverman also told a fringe event at Tory Conference that she wanted to cut welfare spending because ‘far too many people’ who are ‘fit to work’ choose a life of luxury on benefits instead.

Braverman decried our supposed ‘Benefits Street culture’, a reference to the infamous Channel 4 show that helped reinforce stereotypes about the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. Around the time the show was produced, a poll found that the public thought 41 percent of the welfare budget went to people who were unemployed. The real figure was 2.3 percent. This is another crucial side of the issue: the media’s demonisation of working-class communities, which has emboldened politicians to pursue their inhumane policies and paid dividends for those in power.

Never mind, of course, that the vast majority of people who claim Universal Credit, for just one example, are either in work (38 percent, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation), or not expected to work, because they’re ill, disabled, or caring for someone else (37 percent). According to research by the Institute for Public Policy Research, relative poverty rates among working households increased from 13 percent in 1997 to 17.4 percent in 2021. Workers are experiencing the longest pay squeeze since the Napoleonic Wars. In these circumstances, the real way to be ‘fair’ to workers seems obvious: with-inflation pay rises and a liveable minimum wage—not attacking the thin support on which both those working and not working rely.

‘The government are trying to shift the blame for their own failings,’ says Dave, a former data analyst from Manchester. ‘If you’ve got so many people working that rely on Universal Credit, clearly, they’re not work shy. It means there’s a failure of government to make sure there’s a living wage.’

Dave is currently signed off from work with severe mental health issues, and the support he receives doesn’t come close to meeting his basic needs. ‘I can’t afford to live, really,’ he says. ‘Food is costing twice what it did, and I’m two months behind on rent. I’ve never been behind on my rent. There’s a threat of homelessness, and even if you’re not homeless, you’re going to spend the winter in a freezing cold house.’ It doesn’t matter what you cut down on, he continues—there’s always something else eating away at what you don’t have.

For Sarah, the last year has seen her health decline significantly. She’s in secondary care under the pain clinic, and with her mobility increasingly restricted, needs a wheelchair and scooter to get around at times. ‘I’ve needed more specialist equipment like steps, boards, and rails to help me with bathing or getting in and out of bed. My diabetes also means I can’t tolerate certain foods,’ she explains. These additional needs have coupled with soaring energy bills and double-digit inflation to create a vicious spiral. According to the disability equality charity Scope, life for disabled people costs £583 more on average a month—a brutal financial penalty that’s being compounded by the cost of living crisis.

‘I already can’t afford to switch on my heating this year, even with the government help,’ she says. ‘Charging my mobility device and running my CPAP machine take a lot of electric. This winter, if I lose money, I won’t be able to afford food either.’

That so many people on social security are worried about making ends meet this winter shows how unfounded the Tories’ accusations of overgenerosity really are. As Anjum Klair from the TUC noted in Tribune earlier in the year, the basic rate of Universal Credit for an unemployed single person over 25 is around £77 a week, the same as Jobseekers’ Allowance: just a seventh of average weekly pay.

For people like Steve, this unliveable amount mean facing pressure to work even when still physically ill. Steve worked as a housing officer and a support lead for adults with complex needs for two decades. Then he was made redundant at the height of the pandemic, he tells Tribune, and managed to get by with bits and pieces of ad-hoc work through agencies—until Covid struck.

Long Covid has left him physically unable to work for most of the year. ‘It’s been an awful struggle,’ he says. ‘My credit rating is shredded due to so many payment defaults, so at 45 years old, it’s unlikely I’ll ever get a mortgage in my name. I dread to think, in my current condition, what another serious bout of Covid would do for my health. Would I even survive?’

The truth that the Tories want to hide is that our welfare system isn’t plagued by generosity; our population is plagued by low-paid work, insecure hours, spiralling costs like extortionate childcare, and a lack of care for those who are unable to work. Imposing a real-terms slash to benefits at this time is a grim effort to put the crisis to service demonising some of the most vulnerable people in our society—but with wages continuing to stagnate, costs rising further, and a recession and concurrent wave of lay-offs potentially on the way, it should also be understood for what it is: an attack on all of us.

‘I worked very hard as a database administrator when I was younger—sixty- or seventy-hour weeks,’ says Sarah. ‘Even now, with all of my health problems and pain, I still do permitted work of six hours per week as a cleaner, no matter how much it hurts. I take pride in my work, and the fact that I still do it. Unfortunately, the taxi to work means I don’t get to see any wages from it. Suella Braverman could not make it five minutes in my shoes.’