Austerity enters its next phase. Many still don’t use that word or understand what it means. But we are now crossing the line from austerity-lite to deep austerity. One of the chief indicators is that the kind of protests we are seeing are not coming from the much demonised “underclass” – who are presumably too busy breeding, smoking and eating saturated fats – but from those who are “nice” and recognised as “respectable”.

Last week, a tearful woman on Question Time talked about how tax credit cuts may affect her. Tory MPs everywhere are shuffling nervously, not exactly certain how to sell the rhetoric of taking money from the working poor. It’s not as easy for them as cutting benefits, which could simply be depicted as taking candy from obese babies and their feckless mothers.

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Working families won’t be worse off, they keep saying, because wages will go up. But they don’t even sound like they believe their own spiel. And “rebels” like the charisma-vacuum Zac Goldsmith can – unhelpfully for the other Tory MPs – make something of an issue of it.

The chancellor’s summer budget made it clear that he was slashing the income threshold for tax credits from £6,420 to £3,850; this means that from April next year, working tax credit will be reduced for anyone earning over £3,850 pa. Low earners, it’s argued, will be compensated by the “national living wage” of £7.20 an hour, which will come in next April. Someone who is earning £3,850 is, let me remind you, earning less than £75 a week. Many of these people are single mothers in part-time work.

This is cutting to the bone those who are already struggling, and some Tories are deeply uncomfortable about this. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reckons 13 million families will lose about £240 a year, but about a million families will lose £1,000 a year. In a feat of great timing, they will receive the news with a letter just before Christmas.

The new wave of protest will not come from the 'shirkers' who government has already written off, but the strivers

All working-age benefits are now frozen. Local councils are having to make huge cutbacks, and over the weekend we saw nicely spoken junior doctors protesting while consultants covered for them. They are protesting against loss of pay increments, ever longer hours and, contrary to what Jeremy Hunt says, they are supported right across the medical profession and by the public. Most people understand that junior doctors want to be paid more for working on a Saturday night than on a weekday.

This isn’t the only protest the government is facing. The legal profession is also up in arms about legal aid. Civil servants are not happy. Nor are the police or a huge numbers of teachers.

The new wave of protest then will not come from the “shirkers” who government has already written off, but the strivers. Some will be working poor, and some will be in middle-class professions but angry that their pay and working conditions are being driven down.

Tory policy is not just to take away benefits but to depress pay across all the key sectors. Their own party is split as a result. All those in work now see that austerity is not something that happens to other people, it is something that happens to them. If only we had a credible opposition, this would be the time to fight.