If ever there was a time to stand up for the welfare state, it is now. In a few weeks’ time, voters across the UK will decide not just who will govern for the next five years, but whether they can sit back and watch while a Conservative-led government unleashes another £12bn of social security cuts on the poorest and most marginalised.

The Tories may be too cowardly to tell the public exactly what form this next wave of cuts will take, but if they are elected, the experience of austerity so far means we know a few things for sure: the cuts will come, they will be brutal and disproportionate, and heap yet more hardship on millions of poorer and disabled people.

When I began researching and writing about austerity cuts back in 2012, the people I interviewed around the country were terrified of what was to come. They were right to be scared. Even a cursory examination of the misery the coalition has inflicted paints an unsettling picture of one of the world’s richest nations. As the Centre for Welfare Reform (CWR)has pointed out, people in poverty – one in five of the population – bear 39% of all cuts, including to social care and community services. Disabled people, who make up 1 in 13 of the population, have borne 29% of the burden, making them nine times more likely than the average person to have been affected.

As 2015 dawned, the CWR calculated that when services and income are combined, people in poverty are losing £2,195 a year, while for disabled people the figure is £4,410. For those with a disability who also use social care services, the impact doubles to £8,832. As a spokesperson for the disability rights group the Wow Petition (War on Welfare) told me, “The problem [is] that this government, and George Osborne in particular, appear to be willing to target a grossly disproportionate quantum of cuts and pain towards disabled people and their carers, while lying to hide from the British public and the world the true impact of their cuts.”

Just last month the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported that cuts to local authority services were “having a profound impact”, with residents in the poorest communities hardest hit, as predicted at the onset of austerity. The foundation’s research found that “those least able to cope with service withdrawal” were bearing the brunt.

And in the past few weeks there has been ample evidence of the impact of austerity. In the last fortnight we have learned that people struggling to get by are resorting to DIY dentistry; A & E services in England are yet again in crisis; for the first time in two decades life expectancy for older women is declining; and senior doctors have felt the need to unequivocally condemn the coalition’s record on the NHS. Oh, and it also emerged that two thirds of economists believe austerity has harmed the UK economy and that Nick Clegg (as if awakened from a five-year, self-imposed stupor) suddenly thinks state-cutter-in-chief George Osborne is a “very dangerous man”.

The voices of those directly affected by cuts and welfare reforms are, with few exceptions, rarely heard. Over the past 12 months I’ve spoken to and heard from all manner of people affected by cuts and welfare reforms. This includes individuals caught up in the quagmire of benefits changes and sanctions, poverty and mental stress, as well as workers and volunteers at a grassroots level attempting to ameliorate the hardship when and where they can.

There’s an eagerness to remedy the myths about “skivers”; to refute the coalition’s claims that somehow the latent economic recovery translated into the secure, properly paid jobs people want and need; and to bear witness to the ugly truth of austerity’s fallout. As a welfare adviser with two decades of experience told me in early 2015, “It’s always been tough, but I tell you, never as tough as it is now. You are watching people crumble right in front of you. It is soul-destroying. I never dreamed we’d ever be in a situation so horrendous.”

I have been told about a young mother who was left without heat in her home and no money for food after being sanctioned while in hospital giving birth to her second child. And of a woman (her benefits sanctioned too) who was caught shoplifting sanitary towels to spare her teenage daughter the indignity of going without. Then there are the cases of people for whom the strain of losing the financial lifeline of benefits proved too much. Grieving relatives have told me of the struggles to get justice for family members who have died – including one man with severe mental health problems who died of malnutrition.

I spoke to Maria, a 24-year-old professional researcher whose disability means she requires live-in care to assist with basic activities – operating the hoist that helps her into bed, for example. After moving from one council area to another for her job she was told she needed to be “reassessed”, and swiftly became one of the many hidden casualties of severe cuts to social care. Maria was told by officials that the direct payment system in place for young disabled adults in the local authority “had collapsed and there was only a system in place for over-65s”. She became ill fighting the council for her full support package, which she only received after threatening legal action.

“In the last few years I’ve been screamed at in the street for being a ‘benefits cunt’ but never have I felt as subhuman and powerless as [the council] have made me feel,” Maria told me. “There were many occasions when I wanted to stop existing and didn’t know how I would get through the day. I joke that the Tories should just round up all us disabled people and have us shot – it would be quicker and cheaper than what they’re doing and it would put us out of our misery. It’s a dark joke but sometimes it doesn’t feel like it.”

Maria’s experience is not an isolated one. If you’ve escaped the impact of cuts so far, consider yourself lucky, but don’t think that you won’t be affected after the next tranche hits. Those who are completely immune are few. What if an ageing parent needs health services or social care and suddenly there are no beds and not enough care workers, leaving you to carry the burden alone? Or what if you lose your job and find yourself at the whim of the punitive system of sanctions that masquerades as an eligibility test for benefits?

Can you really accept children in your society going hungry, and homelessness – which we once thought was under control – shooting up as a direct result of welfare reforms? Even the so-called hardworking families so beloved of government ministers have, according to one major study, lost £1,127 as a result of tax and benefits changes, and there are now record numbers of working people living in poverty. Does that sound like the economic success story outlined by Osborne?

Under austerity, the current government has demolished some of the country’s most precious social protections while presiding over the worst post-recession economic recovery on record. But what lies ahead if they are returned to power will be much worse. In the foreword to the paperback edition of my book Austerity Bites, Mark Blyth, author of Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, writes that when he walks around the UK today, “outside the London housing bubble and the financial perma-party of the capital’s ‘well-to-do’, I see a society transformed from the ‘haves and have-nots’ I grew up with in Scotland, to what might be called the ‘have-it-all-and-screw-the-poor’ society of today. I used to think Mrs Thatcher did a good number on the working classes of the UK. It turns out that I hadn’t seen anything yet.”

If the past five years have taught us anything it’s that we need to challenge a political status quo that believes it’s fine to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. If we don’t fight for social justice for the whole of society and if we don’t make sure every person has a voice then, in less than a generation, there will not be anything resembling a welfare state left for us to save.

• Austerity Bites: A journey to the sharp end of cuts in the UK is published in paperback on 16 April