The idea of Theresa May as some steadfast, solid presence at the top seems to be slipping away with every passing day, but one part of the mood music around her premiership continues to gently play on. Its tones are soothing and serene, intended to ease us out of one Tory era and into another – and if you listen hard, you can just about make out the chorus: “Cuts? What cuts?”

The new prime minister began her brief campaign for the Tory leadership by pledging to do away with George Osborne’s insistence that the public finances be back in surplus by 2020, only for Osborne to apparently agree, 12 days before she gave him the sack. Soon after, her new chancellor, Philip Hammond, said that the new government would “take whatever measures are necessary” to stabilise the economy, and spoke vaguely of a Treasury “reset”. Last Sunday Damian Green, the new work and pensions secretary, appeared on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show and talked about cuts in the past tense: “The period of austerity meant that tough decisions had to be taken across the board,” he said, as if it were all finally over.

The people who run our cities, boroughs, counties and districts well know what’s actually happening. In the real world, their funding from Whitehall is still being hacked back, while demand for the most basic local services (adult and children’s social care, essentially) increases, and the cuts go on, killing some of the most basic facets of the public realm.

A recent report found that a fifth of local councils believe the state of their parks had declined since 2013, and 39% expect this to worsen in the next three years. In March the BBC put the number of public libraries that had closed since 2010 at a jaw-dropping 343, with another 111 closures in train this financial year alone.

The supposedly non-essential services are always first for the chop – but cuts have gone much deeper. In Leicester the council is now considering closing 11 of the city’s 23 children’s centres. Worcestershire’s county councillors have just agreed a 50% cut in annual spending on the same services, from £6.4bn to £3bn. In Lancashire 31 children’s centres are facing closure.

And then you hit social care. Of England’s adult care spending, 31% is reckoned to have been slashed since 2011. “No one has a full picture of what has happened to older people who are no longer entitled to publicly funded care,” says the King’s Fund.

Children’s care is also feeling the impact. As the number of children who need help increases, reduced budgets entail no end of cutbacks: fewer visits to fostered children by social workers (two-thirds of foster carers say this is now an issue), rising concerns about the impossibility of early intervention, and families’ problems becoming critical.

When I talked two weeks ago to a handful of council leaders, all of them were deeply anxious about the immediate future. In Leeds £200m has already been hacked away from the city’s public services, with a further £110m to come: the city council is looking at its first round of compulsory redundancies, and cuts to residential and day care for elderly and vulnerable adults.

In Newcastle cuts to social care are loading pressures on the NHS, while the council worries about adults with learning disabilities having independence programmes substantially cut back, and being forced to re-enter residential institutions.

Peter Marland, Labour leader of Milton Keynes council asks: ‘How can you choose between a child in a terrible situation, and an old person with dementia?’ Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

In Milton Keynes, a Labour administration is grappling with having to provide for an expanding population on an ever-smaller budget, pointing to choices that the council leader, Peter Marland, finds unconscionable. “How can you choose between a child that is in a terrible situation and requires help, and an old person with dementia? How do you make that choice?”

Tangled up in all this is what Labour people see as one of the most brazen bits of chicanery the Conservatives have ever performed. Towards the end of 2015 Osborne announced a drastic new policy: by 2020 most central government funding of city and local councils was to be phased out; by way of compensation, local authorities could keep all their business rates income, with a system of “top-ups and tariffs” to somehow balance things up between places that would be swimming in money, and less thriving areas whose budgets would suddenly contain huge black holes.

Osborne also promised new sources of funding for increasingly inadequate social care budgets, though councils said these would fall far short of what was needed. No one running our counties and cities seems to have any clue how this will actually work. But by way of easing them into this new world, £300m of “transition” funding was eventually set aside: a relatively trifling sum, but every little helps.

Against the background of cuts already falling on richer areas with much less severity, this is where the story gets really grim. So far the top 10 beneficiaries of this new money run as follows: Surrey, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Essex, West Sussex, Kent, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire. Eight of those 10 have outright Conservative majorities; all are Tory-run. Heading up the list of councils who have not received a penny are the authorities that run Nottingham, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield. All have a Labour majority and councils that have been warning of the impact of austerity for six years.

'Any politician who affects sympathy with people at the sharp end while overseeing such carnage is guilty of cant'

The government says that the new funds are being handed out in “direct proportion” to particular councils’ reductions in support due to changes in the way money is distributed from Whitehall – but it will not release figures to back that claim up. In Nottingham the deputy leader of the city’s Labour council, Graham Chapman, submitted a series of freedom of information requests, asking for the relevant calculations. In July his last attempt was met with an official response that bordered on the impenetrable, but pithily ended with an insistence that “the public interest in withholding the information outweighs that in disclosure”. The question of why his city has so lost out, it seems, is none of his business.

Looking ahead, there might conceivably be some chance of the new rhetoric from May and Hammond, her chancellor, being reflected in a rolling back of the attacks on local services, and a fairer approach to which savings fall where – but talk to the people running councils, and you find little optimism. Many are locked into four-year budget agreements with Whitehall, with cuts that extend until 2020.

Their worst fears are that everything will worsen when Brexit eventually hits the economy. That prospect, in addition to bafflement at how the changes to their financing are going to work, defines a mood of ever increasing fear, compounded by what shields the people at the top from accountability – most of the media’s lack of interest in life outside London, and its allergic reaction to the dread term “local government”.

Meanwhile, the cuts machine grinds on. Be in no doubt: any politician who affects sympathy with people at the sharp end while overseeing such carnage is guilty of cant. “If you’re from an ordinary working class family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realise,” said the new prime minister, just as she took office. It really is – and it’s Tory politicians making millions of those lives ever more impossible.