Lorna Jamison is selling things from her home in Haverhill, Suffolk to buy her two sons winter coats. Family photo frames, ornaments and toys; whatever she can get her hands on and will get some money quickly. She’s full-time carer to Ellis, who is six and has Asperger syndrome, and the benefits the family gets aren’t enough to pay for basics like food and gas.

The bedroom tax took £20 a week (Lorna appealed to the council owing to Ellis’s disability and won but still hasn’t been given back what was overpaid). Lorna has taken out three payday loans and two further high-interest loans in the past year. She’s stopped using electricity when the boys aren’t home.

If this story is starting to sound familiar, it’s because it is. A sort of everyday poverty that has taken hold in this country over the course of this government. This is life after austerity, when a winter coat for your disabled child is luxury and debt and sold toys is old news.

A third of families with disabled children can’t afford heating now, research from the charity, Contact A Family found this week. The number going without food has nearly doubled in the past two years from 16% to 31%. Is this a national crisis yet? I am not sure what more it takes.

Hungry and cold disabled kids get weaker. It does not take an expert to grasp that. Can’t afford the heating? Pneumonia. Can’t afford petrol? Hospital appointments are cancelled. This is the reality of two years of council tax cuts, tax credit changes, and the bedroom tax when life costs more. Of parents going without and in debt, almost a quarter say their disabled child’s health has deteriorated because of a lack of money. What did anyone expect?

Chantal Chaervey from Woodbridge in Suffolk has watched her 12-year-old son Harry, who has severe brain damage and poor immunity, catch 13 lung infections over the past year. Harry is incontinent and gets cold at night when he gets wet from his urine and Chantal can’t afford the extra heating.

That is not a palatable image but then, poverty is not pretty. Neither is disability, at least when the state takes someone’s help – physical and financial – from under them. Talk to carers and charities and the words are “exhausted” and “at breaking point”.

In a separate survey this year by the charity Scope, nearly half of parents of disabled children said they had seen their GP owing to stress and anxiety, as getting regular hot meals became yet another daily battle, next to fighting for shrinking services. Short breaks and overnight care for parents to grab a few hours sleep are becoming a distant memory.

Still, mental health is expendable. Usually women’s. Three-quarters of mothers with disabled children have to give up a career and an income. Isolation and poverty like to come together. There is no money coming in and no one is listening.

Karen Jones, in Flint, Wales, is now stretching £30 for two week’s family shop. She has chronic depression and is full time carer to her 10-year-old son, Aaron, who has severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). His medication means he has extreme weight loss and Karen skips meals to make sure she can afford to feed Aaron. Some days she exists on a piece of toast.

“These are families who are suffering due to no fault of their own,” Terry Wogan notably clarified during this month’s Children In Need appeal, when disabled children were wheeled out for the camera. Tax and government now seems to work on this principle of the deserving and undeserving poor with councils checking claimant’s booze and fag receipts before giving emergency help, as if we now need to establish a person is deserving before their suffering means something. Disabled children are at least perfect for this new narrative. Innocent and in need. The poster child for austerity.

In the rankings of human misery, few things sit worse than a hungry, cold disabled child. Perhaps they are the tear-jerking victims of the cuts anyone hoping to prod an impenetrable Tory heart has been waiting for. This is welfare as a contest. Disabled children the deserving claimants at the front of the queue, Jobseekers the scum pushed to the back. Exactly the ranking and division rampant individualism dreams of, where some people’s struggle matters more than others and the new underclass are set against each other.

Yet disabled children are not “good poor” because there is no such thing as “bad poor”. There are people in poverty, with names and lives, who are being dehumanised because they dare to need something. Starving, disabled children are the ultimate symbol of a cuts agenda that has no limits or conscience. If a sick child does not mark the end of the austerity experiment, there is no hope for any of us.

Some names have been changed