BORIS JOHNSON has turned Downing Street into the equivalent of a US speakeasy during Prohibition, Communist Party general secretary Robert Griffiths said at the weekend.

Mr Griffiths told the party’s newly elected executive committee: “Of course, he’s unfit to be prime minister.

“But what many millions of people need more than a change of tenant at Number 10 is a government that will challenge monopoly power — not protect and subsidise it, including with a battery of new anti-democratic laws to suppress dissent and protest.”

Mr Griffiths pointed to forthcoming gas and electricity price hikes that will plunge a further two million households into fuel poverty, making a total of six million across Britain by the spring.

“Yet the Big Five energy monopolies are making big profits from supply, production or both: for example, Centrica-British Gas almost doubled its profits in the first half of 2021,” the CP leader said.

Britain’s communists demanded strict price controls, a windfall tax on the fossil fuel giants, the permanent abolition of VAT on household energy bills — now made possible by Brexit — and a return of the industry to public ownership.

“The ruling capitalist class is in a prolonged political crisis as the result of divisions and setbacks over austerity policies, relations with the EU and responses to Covid,” Mr Griffiths argued.

“But in the face of Labour Party timidity, it falls to the wider labour movement to unite around a bold left and progressive alternative to the Tories’ pro-big-business agenda.”

The party executive committed communists to take part in joint community campaigning initiatives by trade unions and the People’s Assembly for jobs, pay and public services.