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

WHEN presented with the story of Elsie, a 77-year-old pensioner forced to ride the bus all day to keep warm, Boris Johnson curtly retorted that he had introduced the cut-rate bus pass Elsie had been using.

This shocking boast illustrated exactly why Boris Johnson’s Government is incapable of providing solutions to the cost-of-living emergency that is bringing real hardship to workers and families in Bradford.

He just doesn’t care. If Johnson’s words are not evidence enough of his indifference toward the very people he was elected to serve, his actions, or rather the lack of them, are damning.

Virtually all of Britain’s 2,000 foodbanks have reported a dramatic increase in demand and an Office for National Statistics study has relayed that a quarter of UK adults are struggling to pay their bills.

With inflation at a 30-year high of seven per cent, even those not at immediate risk of falling below the breadline have noticed meagre or non-existent increases in their pay packets be outstripped by spiralling costs

Johnson admitted just last week that the Government “can do more to help” families, but his empty promises won’t put food on the table or a roof over people’s heads.

As luck would have it, Tuesday’s Queen’s Speech provided the Government with the perfect opportunity to put their money where their mouth is.

For the speech to present even an acknowledgement of the distress brought on by the cost-of-living crisis, the first words out of Prince Charles’ mouth had to be spent announcing an Emergency Budget.

An Emergency Budget, to blunt the edge of the cost-of-living crisis by shifting the burden off of working people is by no means a radical suggestion and has been backed by the British Chambers of Commerce.

The Queen’s Speech however did nothing of the sort.

Johnson's defence is that financially supporting families would only hamper the economy in the long run and the country is simply too cash-strapped to stump up the cash anyway.

This is a total misnomer, even a secondary school economics student could tell you, that to get the economy up and running, workers and families must have disposable income in their pockets.

Pleading poverty will bear no fruit either. Sources of unfathomable wealth are at the Government’s fingertips; they just lack the political will to reach out and take it.

Energy companies are making super-profits off the back of price gouging ordinary people, with Shell recording record quarterly profits of £7.3 billion. BP’s Chief Executive summed up the attitude of oil companies to the cost-of-living crisis when he admitted soaring prices had turned the company into “a cash machine”.

The Queen’s Speech was an admittance that this Government is out of ideas and desperately needs to remove the ideological blinkers in the search for solutions to the present crises.

One tool the Government has so far neglected to explore is the use of a Windfall Tax - a tax on profits deemed grossly excessive or unfairly gained.

Oil and gas giants profiteering from the present energy crisis is a tailor-made instance for the implementation of such a tax. The funds raised would be directed into communities at the sharp end of this crisis and used to slash household bills.

Up to now the Tories have rejected taxing these energy companies, preferring to hike National Insurance on ordinary people.

A Windfall Tax is by no means a silver bullet and we must remain open to a variety of potential solutions to the cost-of-living crisis.

For instance, the French Government capped energy price rises at four per cent, insulating the French consumer and passing on the burden of increased costs to the state energy provider.

But what a Windfall Tax will provide is the immediate funding needed to alleviate the stress of those enduring sleepless nights, tossing and turning as they grapple with the choice between heating and eating.

This crisis isn’t going anywhere and with an additional energy cap increase of £830, set to come into place in October, it’s going to get a whole lot worse.

As the cost-of-living crisis intensifies, the Government must reassess a choice of their own, with their defence of oil and gas giants at the expense of the general public growing more indefensible by the day.