So here we go. Reform UK, desperate to shift focus away from legitimate questions about its financial shenanigans, wants to open a fresh front line in the culture wars by taking aim at another vulnerable group in society. Having already targeted Muslims, migrants and transgender citizens, now it is setting sights on autistic and disabled people with a declaration that it can save £50bn a year scrapping or slashing benefits for almost three million people.

Their plans look like they were sketched out on a napkin in a Clacton cafe. But rival parties will respond in panic with their own proposals, leading to disastrous consequences for many marginalised people. Such is the dismal state of British politics.

With its Donald Trump-like loathing of diversity and obsessive focus on white men, Reform has already pledged to ditch swathes of crucial legal protections for people with disabilities, including abolition of the landmark Equality Act on “day one” if it wins power. These measures collectively try to tackle discrimination and harassment, improve accessibility and deliver jobs.

Now it is announcing a scheme to abolish personal independence payments (PIP) – introduced by the coalition government to help fund additional costs of living with disability or a long-term health condition – and the health element of universal credit for working-age people. These will be replaced by a proposed new “health security allowance” – but only the most “severe, enduring and high-risk cases” would receive financial support.

The optics of Nigel Farage and his sidekick Robert Jenrick leading an overhaul of the benefits system by attacking some of the poorest members of our society are grotesque. Farage earns a seven-figure salary, owns five mortgage-free homes and was secretly given a £5m gift from a Thai-based admirer. In the past, he claimed to be “skint” while enjoying the Brussels gravy train, pocketing a six-figure salary in euros as a member of the European Parliament and similar sums from broadcasting (including at the time payments from the Kremlin’s propaganda arm Russia Today).

Jenrick, his Treasury spokesman, is so useless he even bungled his own defection from the Conservatives. And during his stint as housing minister, he was caught unlawfully approving billionaire Tory donor Richard Desmond’s £1bn property scheme. It meant Desmond avoided paying £40m in tax (Jenrick denied any bias in favour of Desmond).

Now consider by contrast those people they are targeting. Working-age adults with disabilities are twice as likely to be in poverty as other Britons and three times as likely to live in social housing. One reason for this poverty gap is the extra cost of disability, which the charity Scope puts at £1,095 a month for a household – yet the average PIP payment is £465. Meanwhile the care system and health service are so dysfunctional family members must often quit jobs – yet the carers’ allowance is a pitiful £86.45 a week. And it is even tougher for people with learning disabilities or who are neurodivergent. An inquiry by the Tory former minister Robert Buckland found only three in 10 autistic adults have a job compared with five in 10 for all disabled people and eight in 10 other folks.

Reform is a populist party far more interested in social media clicks than the hard grind of policy, as shown by its ludicrous 28-page manifesto at the last election with claims that it could save £50bn a year in post-austerity Britain by cutting Whitehall waste. Now Farage – true to form – is both fuelling and jumping on a bandwagon as concern rises over surging welfare costs and soaring public debt. And Jenrick – never a man noted for compassion, not least after he demanded the painting over of cartoon murals in a children’s asylum unit – rails against the supposedly “suicidal empathy” of our current system.

There are problems with the disability benefits system – it is bureaucratic, inefficient, often dehumanising, fails many people in need and frequently makes mistakes. Yet the thought of this self-serving, privileged pair overseeing radical reform is terrifying as they fight to win a battle for supremacy on the hard right by spewing out simplistic solutions to complex issues. So inevitably, they focus on young people with anxiety and mental health concerns.

“This is not an epidemic of broken backs and lost limbs,” says Jenrick. Yet the sharp rise in PIP claimants with psychiatric disorders since 2019 – the year before the pandemic – is almost matched by those with musculoskeletal and neurological diseases due to our ageing society, medical advances, earlier detection of chronic conditions and obesity. All age groups have seen similar proportional rises in claims, while more than one-third of new claimants have both mental and physical health issues.

Despite the Brexit debacle, Farage still often sets Westminster’s agenda. Already the Tories, led by another shallow culture warrior, are shifting on to this terrain with attacks on diversity, pushing false statistics and pledges to roll back the duty for public services to consider equality. Yet Labour helped seed this ground also with its bungling of welfare cuts, joining the pile-on over supposed ‘”over-diagnosis” and threatening of special schools.

Shamefully, the government even promoted the idea life is cushy on benefits when Rachel Reeves ended Motability subsidies for high-end cars with her sneer that the system “was set up to protect the most vulnerable, not to subsidise the lease on a Mercedes-Benz”. And we have just seen arguably this century’s biggest rollback of disability rights with a Supreme Court ruling that effectively brands people with profound needs as lesser citizens.

There are many things politicians could do to chip away at these issues: end points-based PIP assessments, speed up diagnosis of neurodivergence, reduce waiting lists for child mental health services, sort out social care, improve accessibility of housing and transport, plug glaring gaps in community psychiatric services, stop warehousing vulnerable people in the crummiest areas, extend use of personalised budgets, and start to value carers.

Instead, prepare to hear lots of hollow talk from politicians pretending to care about those most in need while they jostle for votes, tussle on TikTok and betray many of our citizens most in need of state support.