This week's MP's column comes from Imran Hussain, Labour MP for Bradford East

THERE is an important difference between putting the infrastructure in place to enable our communities to live with Covid-19 and merely ignoring the threat posed by new and dangerous future variants.

But driven by a pathetic focus on his own self-preservation, Boris Johnson has opted for the latter in a transparent ploy intended to placate disgruntled Conservative MPs.

The Prime Minister’s call for “personal responsibility” in the place of continued Government intervention is as empty a slogan as we have come to expect from Johnson, not least because of the inescapable stench of hypocrisy surrounding the remark.

Yet the issue with this slogan and the policy behind it go far beyond Johnson’s personal misgivings.

By scrapping the ability to get a free Covid test, the Government is cutting us off from the very tools which enable ordinary people to take the initiative and manage the risk of Coronavirus in their daily lives.

Moreover, our ability to identify, analyse and stop new variants from spreading will be hamstrung as testing inevitably plummets.

Even as the pandemic continues, they have also placed further restrictions on the ability of workers to receive sick pay and ended the requirement for those who have tested positive to self-isolate.

This dismantling of regulations cannot be separated from the cost-of-living crisis, with one million adults forced to endure an entire day without food last month and destitution – defined as an inability to buy basic essentials, set to increase by a whopping 30 per cent.

How can families, already feeling the squeeze from surging inflation and tax hikes outpacing meagre wage rises, take on this personal responsibility if they cannot afford to buy once free covid tests?

Similarly, the callous attack on sick pay will force workers into the impossible choice of doing the right thing when it comes to self-isolating and paying their soaring bills.

It should also go without saying that the creation of an economic barrier to covid tests will further embed health inequalities, putting those communities already in hardship at unnecessary risk.

Playing politics with public health is a dangerous game, but to do so at such a crucial juncture in the battle against the virus, sums up this Conservative Government’s approach to politics, which sees the lives of ordinary people as secondary to the retention of power at any cost.

And you don’t need to take my word for it, in a survey of senior NHS staff an overwhelming majority strongly disagreed or disagreed with the premature move to halt free Covid testing for the public and felt similarly when it came to axing self-isolation requirements.

If the last few years have taught us anything, it should be that when key workers at the coalface of a crisis speak up, that those in power take notice.

Even before the pandemic our NHS bore the scars of a decade of Tory mismanagement with a record high four million people languishing on waiting lists. This figure is now six million and rising, and in Bradford alone, more than a thousand people, often in serious pain or discomfort have been waiting over a year for care.

The NHS needs a helping hand from those in power, but Boris Johnson’s reckless approach threatens to overwhelm an NHS already on its knees, whilst infections remain high and with the risk of new strains unconstrained, we must remain vigilant.

Just as poverty and hunger would not cease to exist if the Government stopped recording their existence, Covid carry on claiming lives and destroying families even if we’ve stopped testing and therefore adequately recording cases.

Policy ought to be based on saving lives and shielding our Health Service, not by the shifting winds of the Conservative Party’s internal melodrama.