There is growing unease among the government’s backbench supporters at one more dose of austerity. But “unease” grossly understates the feelings of those in the firing line. Those who can barely scrape a living are about to be hit with a savage wave of cuts, totalling about £2.5 billion. With the economy on the mend, as the Chancellor Philip Hammond claimed in his spring statement this week, this seems like a travesty of social justice. This is the third year working-age benefits (i.e. not pensions) will be frozen, affecting almost 11 million families. It is equivalent to a reduction of three per cent, the largest since the freeze began. And the damage to British living standards from Brexit is still to come.