It would hardly be surprising if the large majority of British people who didn’t vote for the Conservatives were daunted at the prospect of what’s now in store for us. David Cameron and George Osborne can hardly contain their enthusiasm for the torrent of cuts and privatisations they are about to unleash.

This is to be austerity on steroids. The full gory details of the £12bn benefit cuts the Tories refused to identify in the election will have to wait for next month’s “emergency” budget. But Osborne has already rushed through £4.5bn of new cuts and asset sales to get us all in the mood. And he and Cameron are counting on a punch-drunk Labour frontbench to smooth the imposition of a punitive fiscal regime. To wrongfoot the opposition still further, the chancellor now plans to enforce permanent budget surpluses in law. It is, as 77 leading economists warned, a dangerous political gimmick that could help trigger another 2008-style debt crisis.

But indefinite austerity, which transfers wealth from public to private and poor to rich, is Osborne’s aim. Under the coalition it brought economic recovery to a halt and had to be quietly shelved even to achieve the faltering growth of the past couple of years. But now they’re going to kick it all off again, just as the Greek crisis is engulfing the eurozone.

Powerful Tory figures and the OECD are warning Osborne to slow down his planned cuts – or risk stifling growth and hitting workers dependent on tax credits and housing benefit. But instead he’s plunging into a fire sale of government assets: £23bn worth of privatisations – from the huge public stakes in RBS, Lloyds, Royal Mail, the Royal Mint, Met Office and Channel 4.

Not only did the Tories fail to mention most of these privatisations – opposed by the public in repeated polling – before the election, but RBS alone is to be sold at a £13bn loss, throwing away the chance of a publicly owned bank that could help rebuild the economy. And their exchange of long-term revenues for short-term cash injections will do nothing to reduce the deficit.

But then that’s not really the point. The idea is to hand over anything and everything to the City while massaging next year’s borrowing figures. The same determination to enrich their friends while disabling opponents is evidently what also drives Cameron’s plans to make most strikes illegal. And he’s planning to slash Labour party funding by forcing trade unionists to jump an extra legal hurdle to assign their political levy.

Opposition to all this has barely begun. But there’s no democratic reason for people to accept it. The Tories were elected by fewer than 37% of voters. Only 24% of those eligible backed the Conservatives – and that’s not counting the unregistered.

The Conservatives have never won a parliamentary majority on a lower share of the vote in their history. Most of the public oppose the extreme austerity the Tories are preparing to mete out, just as they reject the privatisations. Like the new union political levy “opt-in”, they didn’t feature in the Tory manifesto. The Conservatives have no mandate for these measures. And as for ramping up strike-ballot thresholds while denying trade unionists the chance to vote online, that is a straightforward attack on democratic rights – which should, and will be, resisted.

But the response of Labour’s leadership candidates has been to run a Dutch auction of progressive policies, “swallow the Tory manifesto” and compete to be the most “pro-business”. You’d never know from all this that Labour haemorrhaged votes last month to the anti-austerity Scottish National party and Greens, while working-class Labour supporters stayed at home or switched to Ukip in droves.

That’s why the success of the campaign to get the veteran Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn – or “terrorist-loving leftie” as the Sun prefers to call him – on to the leadership ballot must be welcome. By providing a rallying point for those who want opposition to austerity and endless war, his candidacy should at least halt the mainstream candidates’ stampede to the right – which is taking them further away from the voters they need to win back.

Given that any Labour supporter can now sign up to vote for £3, the reluctant Corbyn is likely to do better than many media pundits imagine. There’s a clear parallel with the insurgent role of the socialist US senator Bernie Sanders, currently challenging Hillary Clinton from the left for the Democratic party presidential nomination. Dismissed by the establishment, Sanders has galvanised support from young people with his opposition to corporate greed and support for higher taxes on the rich and military spending cuts — and is now running within 10 points of Clinton in the New Hampshire primary polls. Partly because of the mood Sanders is drawing on, Clinton is having to shift ground on issues such as inequality and “free trade” deals.

One way or another, the political establishment cartels have to be broken open if the majority are going to get a look-in. In Britain, last month’s election has been portrayed as a Conservative landslide. It was nothing of the kind. Cameron has a majority of 12 in the Commons – which has already shown itself vulnerable to pressure, despite Labour prevarication – and none in the Lords.

The Tories are far from having the wind in their sails. Regardless of the election result, they’re still widely regarded as the creatures of a discredited elite, with no answer to the now almost universally acknowledged crisis of inequality – except to deepen it. They are slashing support for an economy yet fully to recover and which is in no state to withstand renewed shocks.

There’s no necessity to put up with the attacks they’re about to launch on millions of people’s living standards, and every reason to resist them. The austerity programme needs to be opposed in parliament, but also with industrial action, demonstrations and local campaigns. That process is already kicking off, with a national anti-austerity march in London this Saturday.

If opposition is to be successful beyond particular issues, it will need to become a social movement. But the starting point has to be a break with a post-election sense of public powerlessness. Unchecked austerity is not inevitable. Stronger governments than this one have been forced to change course – and defeated.

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