Piers Corbyn

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

Mark Steele, who campaigns against 5G, was given space on the stage to say that the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (the panel advising the government on Covid response) was ‘a terrorist organisation’ and that ‘the virus is a hoax’. The son of well-known conspiracy theorist David Icke was allowed on stage to cite ‘the Great Reset’ – a longstanding theory adopted by QAnon which holds that the global elite want to kill off most of the population, possibly for environmental reasons. Piers Corbyn, brother of the former Labour leader, told the protestors there were ‘four legs and a tail’ to the ‘new world order’, implying not only that there was a secret agenda for a one-world government, but that this agenda was also demonic.8 A mainstream protest against government overreach this was not.

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During the pandemic, Arcuri appeared to suggest that Johnson’s new wife, Carrie Johnson, was a Satanist, alongside others in government. Her feed suggested that vaccines were a ‘genocidal initiative’ and accused people promoting jabs as ‘paid for shills’.70 This is hardly a problem unique to the Conservative party. Piers Corbyn, the brother of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, had built a fringe career as something of a rogue weather forecaster and climate change conspiracist. But Covid-19 saw him pivot rapidly to anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown protest of an extreme sort. Corbyn shared photos of his supporters mobbing the current Labour leader Keir Starmer, calling him a ‘traitor’ who ‘protected paedophiles’.71 Corbyn has suggested vaccines are part of a ‘new world order’ agenda and claimed they are a ‘hoax’, while his supporters are often pictured with QAnon-related apparel, signs or slogans.72 These strange cross-political combinations were just as visible in the US conspiratorial anti-vaccine movements, with perhaps even stranger outcomes in their rallies.

The Price of Life: In Search of What We're Worth and Who Decides
by Jenny Kleeman
Published 13 Mar 2024

Many are peppered with hashtags directing people to go down conspiracy rabbit holes like #TheNewWorldOrder (the belief that authoritarian globalist elites are conspiring to take over the word) and #TheGreatReset (the belief that authoritarian socialist globalist capitalists are using the World Economic Forum to take over the world). Piers Corbyn, brother of former Labour Party leader Jeremy, who believes Covid-19 is a hoax and somehow connected to 5G, is here somewhere. But for every committed conspiracy theorist, there is someone else who is just fed up with lockdown and frustrated that there is no way to call it into question. A woman in a belted trenchcoat is about to meet up and march with her parents, both in their seventies, both vulnerable.

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight
by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears
Published 24 Apr 2024

It is very difficult to ask the British population uniformly to obey guidelines in the way that is necessary.’52 In fact, polling showed many in the public were supportive of lockdowns to control infection and often wanted the government to go further. While there were riots in continental countries like the Netherlands against the daily infringements of their personal liberty, a similar movement in England never got much further than the conspiracy fringe of far-right libertarians and Piers Corbyn, the brother of the left-wing former Labour leader. The only time the bulk of people in this country got properly angry about the lockdowns was when they found out that staff in Downing Street, including the prime minister himself, had been repeatedly breaking the rules they had written for everyone else.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It
by Daniel Knowles
Published 27 Mar 2023

But she faces people on one side who think that their most fundamental rights (to drive everywhere quickly and painlessly) are being trampled on, while others think that what it is happening is long overdue. It is not just in Moseley. Over the past couple of years, LTNs have become a hot topic all over England. Across London you will see signs erected in people’s gardens that read “Stop the Road Closures.” Some of the planters have been tipped over, while cameras have been spray-painted. Piers Corbyn, the conspiracy theorist brother of Jeremy Corbyn, Britain’s former opposition leader, thinks that they are part of a “new normal” agenda intended to turn Britain into a dictatorship under the guise of a fake public health emergency. Or something like that anyway. Britain’s right-wing tabloids, in particular the Daily Mail, have made campaigning against LTNs an obsession.

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain
by Robert Verkaik
Published 14 Apr 2018

Instead he devoted his energies to school politics. In the wake of the Profumo scandal the country went to the polls in 1964, electing the first Labour government for thirteen years. Adams’ held a mock election in which Corbyn stood as the Labour candidate. His brother Piers, now a well-known weather forecaster, represented the Communist Party.6 Jeremy Corbyn’s friend and campaign manager Bob Mallett remembered: ‘At a middle-class boarding grammar school in leafy Shropshire, there weren’t many socialists. We were trounced.’7 Corbyn left with just two E grade A-levels and a warning from his headmaster that ‘you’ll never make anything of yourself’.8 Yet his academic failings did nothing to dim his self-confidence and belief that his voice should be heard.

London Review of Books
by London Review of Books
Published 14 Dec 2017