Piers Corbyn, the older brother of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, is among the UK’s busiest conspiracy theorists.

A former Labour councillor and organiser, Corbyn originally made a name in the conspiracist milieu as a climate change denier, gaining press coverage for rubbing shoulders with the Holocaust denier Nick Kollerstrom.

However, he gained national notoriety as a figurehead of the UK’s anti-vaccine protest movement shortly after COVID-19 lockdowns began in 2020. Corbyn organised and headed a multitude of conspiracy theory-driven anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine demonstrations at which he was often arrested, generating extensive press coverage. He was also arrested in 2021 for distributing leaflets likening vaccination efforts to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Corbyn stood in the London mayoral election in 2021 for his own political party, Let London Live (LLL), but received less than 1% of the vote. He has gone on to contest other local and parliamentary elections, although both he and other LLL candidates have reliably returned paltry results.

In October 2021, a week after the murder of Sir David Amess MP, Corbyn led a small group of protesters who erected a gallows in Parliament Square. In December, Corbyn was again arrested after he told a demonstration that they needed to “get a bit more physical” with those who supported restrictions and “take down lying MPs”. He added that they needed to: “hammer to death those scum who have decided to go ahead with introducing new fascism […] We’ve got to get a list of them […] and if your MP is one of them, go to their offices and, well, I would recommend burning them down […].”

Corbyn has broadened his focus from COVID-19 onto other issues, reflecting a wider shift in the conspiracy theory-oriented protest movement. This includes taking aim at Drag Queen Story Hour events, the children’s book reading sessions, and particularly conspiracy theory-driven campaigns against “Low Traffic Neighbourhoods” and Low Emission Zone measures in Oxford, London and other cities. He also received press attention after labelling the 7 October Hamas attack in Israel as a “false flag operation.”