GEORGE OSBORNE casually remarks that slashing an additional £4 billion off public spending by the end of this parliament is not “a huge amount in the scheme of things.”

It’s hard to tell whether the Chancellor is speaking from ignorance or malice.

The Cabinet has shown ample evidence of both.

David Cameron’s bewilderment that his own local authority might have to cut services after his administrations had slashed funding for councils by 40 per cent over five years implied that government was simply not paying attention to the devastation caused by Tory “austerity” policies.

But then, Iain Duncan Smith’s long battle to prevent publication of evidence that thousands of people had died within six weeks of being declared “fit for work” — a struggle that included him telling Parliament at one stage that these now published statistics did not exist — indicated a savage and calculating regime which knows exactly how much pain it is causing.

Whatever is going on in Osborne’s head, we can be sure that outside it the imposition of further cuts is going to hurt.

Sisters Uncut’s blockade of the Treasury yesterday, calling for ring-fenced funding for domestic violence services, is an illustration of that.

Talk of local government cuts in the abstract might not make the blood boil, but as Unison Scotland’s John Stevenson explains in today’s Morning Star: “People don’t always know the range of essential services councils provide. When they actually need one of those services, they find resources are cut to the bone.”

That’s certainly been the case for domestic violence victims over the past six years. The specialist services that support them come out of council budgets — meaning, as Sisters Uncut put it, that “the ability of domestic violence survivors to flee abuse now depends on their postcode.”

The funding available for these services has dropped by nearly a third since 2010, and no fewer than 32 refuges for women seeking a safe haven have closed.

Those that remain are currently forced to turn away one in three women because they don’t have enough room to let them in.

This is unacceptable. Violence against women represents a global epidemic, with five killed every hour worldwide.

And it is not a “third world” problem. One in three women in Britain will experience domestic violence.

If abused women have nowhere to go, many will have no choice but to stay where they are. And if that means with a violent partner then their life could be at risk.

Six years of Conservative cuts have left the services which support some of the most vulnerable people in this country in crisis.

It is no use appealing to the conscience of a government whose leader — the very same who once tried to reinvent his party’s dog-eat-dog philosophy as “compassionate Conservatism” — was happy to take £30 a week from the pockets of disabled people last week, and which is planning a further raid on personal independence payments in the Budget that could see over 500,000 people with disabilities lose up to £3,000 a year.

But Cameron’s majority is wafer-thin, and a revived and energised Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn has already forced him to retreat on multiple occasions, from tax credit cuts to Sunday trading.

There is every reason to support Sisters Uncut and put maximum pressure on MPs to protect spending on services which literally save lives.