Boris Johnson lashes Jeremy Corbyn as modern day Stalin

Boris Johnson has launched his election campaign, likening Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to Stalin.

Jeremy Corbyn during an election campaign event on Brexit in Harlow. Picture: AP.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has launched his Conservative party election campaign with a withering take down of ­Labour, likening leader Jeremy Corbyn to Stalin.

In a warning to the electorate, Mr Johnson said Mr Corbyn would increase taxes across the board if Labour were returned to Downing Street on December 12 with official campaigning to begin at midnight on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT).

Liberal Democrat Party leader Jo Swinson has ruled out forming aminority government alliance with Labour. Picture: Getty Images.

In an unusual move Mr Johnon’s speech for the Wednesday night Tory campaign launch to be held in the Midlands was published ahead of time and in full in The Telegraph, in which he has a regular column.

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Mr Johnson wrote that while the Tories cheered successful businesspeople, Labour would destroy prosperity.

“When someone gets up at 5am to get their shop ready; when someone risks their savings on an idea or a new product; when someone has the guts to enter a new market — at home or abroad — we don’t sneer at them,” he said. “We cheer for them: because their success is our success; and the tragedy of the modern Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn is that they detest the profit motive so viscerally — and would raise taxes so wantonly — that they would destroy the very basis of this country’s prosperity.

“They pretend that their ­hatred is directed only at certain billionaires — and they point their fingers at individuals with a relish and a vindictiveness not seen since Stalin persecuted the Kulaks.

“In reality they would end up putting up taxes on everyone: on pensions, on businesses, on inheritance, on homes, on gardens.”

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon during a campaign visit in Dalkeith, Midlothian. Picture: AFP.

Mr Johnson said Labour was committed to putting up corporate taxes to some of the highest levels in Europe.

The Prime Minister said the choice for Britain was clear. Labour offered “Corbyn and his two favourite advisers, Dither and Delay’’ which will turn 2020 into the year of two miserable referendums, one on the EU, and another on Scotland.

Mr Johnson said Mr Corbyn has done a shady deal with the Scottish National Party, which he would risk the break-up of the Union to keep himself in power.

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has appealed for support for a second referendum, saying that a vote for her party is a vote to escape from Brexit.

Mr Corbyn on Tuesday ramped up his campaign with a series of fiery claims, ­including outlandish suggestions the Tories would allow ­rat hair in paprika and maggots in ­orange juice.

The Labour leader gave a portent of the key policy announcements he will make on Wednesday when he attended a local MP’s event in Harlow, Essex, on Tuesday night and claimed the Tories “want to hijack Brexit to unleash Thatcherism on steroids’’.

Drawing on a favourite criticism of the Johnson government, Mr Corbyn insisted that “our NHS is not for sale’’ and attacked the Tories for looking across the Atlantic for a deregulated American economic model.

The Tory party and US President Donald Trump have consistently denied that the National Health Service would be opened up to American companies in any post-Brexit free-trade agreement.

But Mr Corbyn knows that the NHS and food standards are sensitive issues for voters.

“Given the chance, they’ll slash food standards to match the US, where what are called ­‘acceptable levels’ of rat hairs in paprika, and maggots in orange juice are allowed and they’ll put chlorinated chicken on our supermarket shelves. They want to move us towards a more ­deregulated American model of how to run the economy.’’

Mr Corbyn didn’t rule out forming a Remain alliance with the Liberal Democrats who are campaigning to cancel Brexit.

But Libs Dems Leader Jo Swinson when asked if her party could support a Labour government in the event of a hung parliament, she said: “I am absolutely, categorically ruling out Lib Dem votes putting Jeremy Corbyn in No 10.”

Instead she believes that she can be prime minister in her own right, if there are quite dramatic changes of fortune for her party which would require a wholesale loss of Labour seats throughout the country and taking swaths of the southeast from the Tories.

Meanwhile, one of the Tory Remainer rebels, former chancellor Philip Hammond, announced he would not stand for re-election.