Next month, a seemingly minor “welfare” policy will come into force. You won’t hear a chorus of MPs talking about it. It’s unlikely to make any newspaper front pages. But it will determine whether millions of families will have enough money to live on – and give a snapshot of what Brexit Britain is really going to look like.

The benefits freeze – that Osbornomics pillar of post-crash “welfare reform” – has squeezed low-income families for the past three years: while rent, food and utility bills have shot up, many social security rates have been frozen. From April, the policy will enter its fourth year. This coincides with households facing price hikes to gas and electricity, council tax and water bills, and food banks rushing to stockpile supplies in preparation for a Brexit-dented economy. The result is simple and brutal: freezing benefits for another year means some of the poorest families in the country will become nearly £900 poorer in 2019-20, according to the Resolution Foundation. In the real world, that means a single mum on a zero-hour contract facing eviction because her housing benefit won’t stretch to cover the rent. Or an ex-teacher with Parkinson’s skipping meals because his out-of-work sickness benefits don’t cover the cost of food.

The scale of this is as big as it gets. Between 2016 and 2020, the benefit freeze will have swept 400,000 more people into poverty, and affected more than 27 million people. That includes 11 million children. The families about to be squeezed for another year are not starting off in a secure position: they have already endured nearly a decade of low wages, rising prices and benefit changes. They have no shield to survive another hit.

That you are hearing barely a whisper from Westminster about this is not as bad as it gets. When pressed to comment this month, Philip Hammond actively defended his choice to maintain the freeze – even dragging out the old trope that such moves are necessary after previous Labour governments’ high welfare spending. Notably, Hammond has found the cash for yet another tax cut for high earners, as well as £26bn of “fiscal headroom” until a Brexit deal is agreed.

The choice to continue the benefits freeze is emblematic of a political class that has learned little from the past, and has few answers for where we’re heading. It is “business as usual” politics, all at a time when there has never been more pressing need for change.

To watch parliament lurch between ever-poorer Brexit options this week is not so much reminiscent of captains rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic as of ones who are oblivious to the fact that the iceberg has already hit. The threat of an economic downturn post-Brexit is significant and deeply worrying, but much of the conversation around it ignores the fact that, for many, real hardship is already here. Swathes of families in Britain are living in an economy where they can’t even afford the basics. Official figures released this week show that the number of children and pensioners in absolute poverty jumped in the last year, all at the same time as inequality rose. A decade of catastrophic cuts by George Osborne and his successor has left Britain on its knees: child poverty leaving kids unwashed and hungry; elderly and disabled people abandoned without social care; schools barely able to stay open all week, let alone nurture the next generation.

To put it another way, the unspoken truth among the Brexit mayhem is that this is not a country that is preparing to launch itself into the abyss: it is one where millions have been expected to live in darkness for years. There is a reason why warnings of an economic downturn failed to register with some leave voters during the EU referendum campaign, and measures such as the benefit freeze will convince many that the status quo of approved inequality is here to stay. That the Children’s Society recently found that the number of people awarded crisis support by the state has plummeted by 75% since the government cut funding and pushed the burden on to cash-strapped councils in 2013 is a symbol of where we currently find ourselves: a country that has not witnessed greater need in modern times but is seemingly devoid of any desire to meet it.

No matter how Brexit itself concludes, the conditions that brought us here have not begun to be addressed, nor is there any proof the Britain that will emerge from the wreckage is one that struggling families can put their trust in. The fact that a “caretaker prime minister” could be a necessity shows how rudderless and entirely without ambition much of our politics now is.

Whether it is Brexit or years of austerity, if any of this is to mean anything, it is going to have to lead to some self-reflection from those at the top – call it a national reckoning about what sort of society we are going to be. It is the one question that no one in the parliamentary chaos appears to be asking – what next? Because lost among the talk of backstops and trade deals, this is a country that is crying out for social and economic change. As it is, we are all just frozen in time.

• Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist

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