Rachel Reeves’ autumn Budget is undoubtedly the most unfair in my living memory. Put simply, it punishes those who get up, go to work, and do the right thing, while rewarding those who don’t. According to the Resolution Foundation, workers earning around £35,000 a year will be £1,400 worse off under the Chancellor’s plans.

Make no mistake, £35,000 is a modest, typical salary for a young professional. And when your take-home pay after tax and student loan is a little over £28,000, it’s not a minor inconvenience, it’s a serious hit. Yet in the very same Budget, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a well-respected think-tank, reports that 18,000 families who do not work will be £14,000 better off. That £14,000 is more than half the take-home pay of the young professional who actually goes out to work to earn it.

And it doesn’t end there. According to The Times, some larger benefit-dependent families will be £20,000 better off after the Budget, effectively gaining what many young workers bring home in an entire year.

I have to get up at 6am on a Saturday and work all hours to earn that. They don’t have to work at all. How can that possibly be right? Further CSJ analysis shows a British family with three children, with at least one parent on average Universal Credit and related benefits, will receive up to £46,000 next year. Meanwhile, a family with one adult working full-time and the other part-time on the national living wage will take home £28,000. The working family is £18,000 worse off.

To match the income of a three-child family on combined benefits, a worker would now need a £71,000 salary. To match a five-child family, closer to £90,000. That’s three to four times what I earn, the idea of ever being able to earn that amount of money feels completely unreachable. Yet now households on benefits will receive that level of income without working.

It does not take genius to see how backwards this is. And that’s why my generation, the one Labour assumes will back them forever, must finally wake up. This Budget has to be the penny-drop moment. Fairness is not ideological. It’s simple: if you work, you should always be better off than those who don’t. That should not be a controversial statement.

For years, young voters have stuck with Labour out of habit, cultural identity, university politics and peer pressure. Anything but the actual policies. But this must be the breaking point. Young people should not forgive a Chancellor who believes their effort counts for less than doing nothing, and who treats those trying to build a future as if they are the problem, as if they are greedy, as if they aren’t doing enough already and must do more.

Surely young people will recognise the basic unfairness in this Budget and consider alternatives, including the Conservatives, who are currently the only party willing to defend the principle of fairness and the idea that work should pay.

There is endless debate over whether Rachel Reeves misled the public about a fiscal black hole. Frankly, I don’t care whether she did or didn’t. She should resign over the Budget itself. A Chancellor whose decisions leave working households poorer than benefit-dependent households has failed at the most basic level.

It is a fundamental failure of judgement. Reeves has delivered a Budget that tears up the principle of fairness and replaces it with a system that rewards dependency and penalises responsibility. If that isn’t resignation-worthy, then nothing is.

• Sophie Corcoran is Young People’s Director at the Great British PAC