BRITAIN’S deepening social crisis confirms the urgent need to replace Theresa May’s minority regime with a left-led Labour government, Communist Party general secretary Robert Griffiths declared at the weekend.

Reporting to the party’s executive committee, he slammed Dame Judith Hackitt’s review of building regulations in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster and the Tory response.

She had stopped short of calling for a ban on combustible cladding, while Housing & Communities secretary James Brokenshire had promised a consultation on the Hackitt report followed by unspecified legislation.

“The is the ‘British way’ when it comes to limiting the reckless, anti-social, profiteering activities of big business — guidance notes, voluntary codes of practice, toothless ombudspersons, ‘light touch’ regulation and, when things go horrendously wrong, committees of inquiry, judicial reviews, empty declarations and, occasionally, a royal commission,” the CP leader said.

“In fact, anything except legislative bans and powerful action to enforce them.”

He described the Grenfell scandal as the “most dramatic illustration” of Britain’s housing crisis and “grotesque levels of social inequality and injustice.”

Mr Griffiths condemned the sell-off of social housing to private developers, property speculators and “giant US multinational corporations such as Blackstone.”

And he attacked “socially affordable” housing clauses in private-sector housebuilding contracts as a “cruel hoax.”

Instead of the large-scale revival of the private rental sector, he argued that only a massive programme to build more public-sector houses and apartments would ensure “decent, affordable and secure homes for all.”

Mr Griffiths also highlighted Britain’s “institutionally racist” immigration system and severe funding and staff shortages in the NHS as two other significant aspects of a wider and deeper social crisis.

The Communist Party executive reaffirmed its support for the election of a left-led Labour government, while warning that only an upsurge in mass extra-parliamentary campaigning will create the most favourable conditions for victory.