Eight months on from being elected on the promise of “change”, we’re beginning to see what Labour’s version of that looks like: sweeping cuts to the benefits system that have outraged charities, claimants and backbench MPs alike.

Plans to freeze the personal independence payment (Pip) have been dropped after a backlash from Labour MPs. But eligibility for the benefit will be severely tightened. It is thought the move will deny support to about 1 million disabled people, including those who ­struggle with washing, dressing themselves and ­eating.

The long-hated work capability assessment will be scrapped, with all extra health support to come via Pip. The basic rate of universal credit (UC) will be raised for those able to seek work, while the highest level of UC – for the most disabled or ill people who have been found not fit to work – will go down for new claimants. New claimants with “the most severe, lifelong health conditions”, who will never be able to work, will see their incomes protected through an additional premium as well as an end to reassessments – but young people under the age of 22 could miss out on the health top up payment entirely.

Added up, the package amounts to £5bn worth of cuts – the largest since George Osborne slashed benefits support a decade ago.

With the benefits bill rising and a record number of people off work owing to long-term illness, the government is banking on all this sounding reasonable. Surely everyone who can work should? But expose the plans to the most basic facts and they’re rotten with contradictions and cruelty.

Even with the U-turn, the bulk of the cuts will fall on the Pip budget, despite the benefit having nothing to do with employment. Indeed, removing Pip – which is often used to pay for taxis, mobility aids and care staff – is more likely to push disabled people out of employment. Pip is also a “gateway benefit”, and ministers are yet to address whether those losing it could see their families lose vital carer’s allowance too.

Meanwhile, the plan to reduce UC for the whole “unfit to work category” will hit many severely ill and disabled people who will not be protected by the new premium. Ministers say this will “incentivise” people to stay in the work-search group, as if the reason a teacher confined to bed with ME quit her job is that she’s just not incentivised enough.

This is austerity dressed up as reform, where the government cuts the money disabled people need to live on in order to balance the books, while claiming it’s all being done to help them.

We have been here before. Over the past 15 years, successive coalition and Conservative governments repeatedly targeted disability benefits and other support disabled people rely on. I have documented the toll in these pages: the distress, the destitution and the deaths.

Many of the same people reading headlines today about how their income will be stripped have already had their Motabilty car taken away, lost their adapted home to the bedroom tax or been pushed into debt to pay rising social care fees. If the lines you hear ministers parrot on their media rounds to justify these latest cuts sound familiar – that there is no money, that the genuinely disabled will be helped, that there is a duty to work – it is because you have been hearing them off and on for more than a decade. The difference this time round is it is a Labour government saying them.

We know from the last time we were here that low benefit rates do not get disabled people into work – they just get them to the local food bank. We know divisive rhetoric from politicians increases hate crimes against disabled people, just as we know austerity doesn’t save the economy money – it actually loses it. Making disabled people poorer or forcing them into work has, funnily enough, never made them better.

Pat McFadden, the minister who oversees the royal family’s multibillion-pound estate, remarked on Tuesday that “you can’t tax and borrow your way out of the need to reform the state”. But you can tax the super-rich and use the cash to invest in disability support – Labour has simply chosen not to. It is a choice that is bordering on zealotry at this point, a “moral” mission contrary to the advice of economists.

No Labour MP expected to vote the cuts through in the coming months can pretend they do not know where all this ends: the rules for Pip alone could see up to 1.2 million people lose between £4,200 and £6,300 a year, according to the Resolution Foundation, the majority of whom are already in some of the poorest households in the country. As one reader wrote to me last week: “I [pay a carer] to get help washing my hair and I couldn’t afford this without Pip. I’m so scared of losing support and any dignity and enjoyment in my small life.”

Benefit cuts with a red rosette are in many ways no different from those stained blue. Joints still throb when the heating has to be switched off in winter. Stomachs still pang with hunger when there is only a biscuit for tea. And yet cuts signed off by a Labour chancellor are in a sense particularly brutal. They come with a tinge, not just of fear, but despair and betrayal. There is a feeling that, if this is life under the “good guys”, there really is no hope that anything will get better. Politicians, it turns out, really are all the same. That is the sort of loss that can’t be measured by a Treasury spreadsheet. It is also something that – once lost – is deeply hard to get back.

The consequences of this will be a conversation for another day – think growing disfranchisement or ever-declining mental health – but for now, as the announcement of the cuts settles, let us return to what we know. People in this country who are already suffering will be going to bed with more worry tonight. Families who are struggling to pay the bills now will be pushed further below the breadline. Others who have long been excluded from everyday life will be more isolated and segregated.

That it is a Labour government making “the moral case” for taking disabled people’s benefits is as perverse as it is shameful. Change, it turns out, is not coming for everyone.