Piers Richard Corbyn (; born 10 March 1947) is a British weather forecaster, anti-vaccine activist, conspiracy theorist, and former politician. Corbyn was born in Wiltshire and raised in Shropshire wherein he attended Adams' Grammar School. He was awarded a first class BSc degree in physics from Imperial College London in 1968 and a postgraduate MSc in astrophysics from Queen Mary College, University of London, in 1981. Corbyn was a member of the Labour Party and served as a councillor in the London Borough of Southwark from 1986 to 1990. He is the elder brother of former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, leaving Labour in 2003 due to his opposition to the Iraq War.
Corbyn ran a weather monitoring company called WeatherAction in the 1990s and gained some prominence in the media for his predictions and, later more so, for his rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, he was a prominent proponent of conspiracy theories. He described SARS-CoV-2 as a "hoax", frequently campaigned against lockdowns and against COVID-19 vaccines, and described COVID-19 vaccines as dangerous. Corbyn was arrested on several occasions for taking part in protests against public health laws, and on suspicion of encouraging people to burn down the offices of members of Parliament.
Early life and education Piers Corbyn was born on 10 March 1947 in Chippenham, Wiltshire. He grew up at Yew Tree Manor in Pave Lane, in Newport, Shropshire, a 17th-century country house which was once part of the Duke of Sutherland's Lilleshall estate. He began recording weather and climate patterns in 1962 at the age of fifteen, constructing his own observation equipment. He attended Castle House School and Adams' Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire.
Higher education At 18, he went to Imperial College London, being awarded a first class BSc degree in physics in 1968.INTERVIEW: PIERS CORBYN 1 June 2007 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. He commenced postgraduate research there into superconductivity, but then went into student representation and politics for some years. In 1979, he returned to postgraduate study at Queen Mary College, University of London, being awarded an MSc in astrophysics in 1981.Whether the weather be... QUAD Magazine, 2007, Queen Mary University of London While he was an undergraduate, an article by Corbyn was published in the Royal Meteorological Society's magazine Weather discussing a brine barometer and an electrical thermometer.
Student representative In 1969, Corbyn became the first president of the Imperial College Students' Union to be directly elected by the student body. As president until 1970, Corbyn was successful in establishing a sabbatical union president, enabling the elected student leader to be registered at the college without having to study or pay fees (in fact they received a grant from the college and union).The History of Imperial College London, 1907–2007, Hannah Gay, p. 437
Corbyn set up a short-lived Imperial College Representative Council, seats on which were distributed between members of the college on the basis of their numbers, a system that almost gave students a majority. The ICAUT, a staff union, refused to cooperate with this student-led initiative. Although this particular council did not survive, increased student representation on college boards and committees became a lasting success of Corbyn's time as ICU president.
Corbyn, together with the rector at the time, Lord Penney, received the Queen when she opened a new administrative building in 1969. During the visit Corbyn petitioned the Queen in front of 900 people, asking for students to be given greater say in the governance of the college.Gay, Hannah (2007). The History of Imperial College London, 1907–2007. London: Imperial College Press, 437, 477 and Illustration 102. .
Career
Housing-rights activist Corbyn was a housing and squatters' rights activist in the north Paddington area of the City of Westminster in the mid-1970s. He helped organise the All London Squatters Federation, the squatters union and the Squatters Action Council (SAC). Although they issued publications and mounted protests, in the assessment of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch the "real activists" in these organisations, Corbyn among them, were "limited to not more than about a dozen persons" and had "very little influence on squatters".
In 1974, he stood for election to Westminster City Council in Harrow Road ward as a Squatters and Tenants candidate; in 1978, he and a colleague stood in Harrow Road as Decent Housing candidates.Harrow Road ward election results In the 1977 GLC election he was the International Marxist Group candidate for Lambeth Central.
He and some of the squatters in Elgin Avenue were, as a result of their campaign which included the building of barricades against eviction, rehoused by the GLC in 1975 spread out between Westminster and other London boroughs to discourage the risk of further united action. For their 3-year occupation, it was "a 'victory' of sorts", which Corbyn, attributed to three factors: (1) a public campaign that "related to the whole housing crisis" so that support was won from the labour movement; (2) democratic organisation so that "everyone could join in and know that what they did was part of what everyone was doing"; and (3) a readiness to "defy the law" proving that the residents were "serious and not squatting for fun".
In August 1978, Corbyn, then with the Advisory Service for Squatters (ASS), was present when 650 members of the Special Patrol Group cleared 160 squatters out of 5 blocks in Huntley Street, behind University College Hospital. Corbyn summarised the squatters case in the slogan "No [housing] waiting lists while homes lie empty". With Jim Paton of the ASS, he was convicted of "resisting the sheriff" contrary to Section 10 of the Criminal Law Act 1977. In solidarity, 150 Dutch squatters "besieged" at the British Embassy in The Hague.
Party politics Corbyn was a member of the Labour Party. He was elected as a Labour councillor for Burgess Ward of the Southwark London Borough Council in 1986 but lost in 1990.Ex-Labour councillor Piers Corbyn to stand in Chaucer by-election Friday 3 April 2015, Bankside Press In 1987, Corbyn was arrested for the defacing of an SDP–Liberal Alliance poster, but cautioned and released without charge. For seven years he was an unpaid campaigns organiser in Southwark and Bermondsey, being thanked by Tony Blair in 1998 at Downing Street.Paul Vallely He visited in glory days of '97, but has Blair kept his vow to Aylesbury Estate? The Independent, Tuesday 12 April 2005 Corbyn left the Labour Party in 2002 in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, and stood as an independent candidate in 2002 and in a 2015 council by-election. According to The Sunday Times in September 2017, his attempt to rejoin the Southwark Constituency Labour Party in January 2017 was blocked.
His brother, Jeremy Corbyn, was elected MP for Islington North in 1983, was re-elected in every following election , and served as Leader of the Labour Party and hence Leader of the Opposition from 2015 to 2020. In August 2015, Corbyn supported his brother's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election, on the basis that he stood for proper debate and accountability, including on climate.Piers Corbyn denies claims that he opposes brother Jeremy's Labour leadership bid Southwark News, 20 August 2015Piers Corbyn: the other rebel in the family" , The Guardian. Retrieved on 5 March 2018. On Twitter, he urged people to register to vote and back Jeremy Corbyn to lead the Labour Party.
In March 2016, Corbyn was among a group of protesters at a Lambeth council meeting who reportedly "screamed abuse in the faces" of party councillors. Corbyn later told the BBC that he personally sought to make his points by talking to people, rather than shouting.
WeatherAction Following some years of weather prediction as an occupation, he formed WeatherAction, a business, in 1995. WeatherAction is the business through which Corbyn sells his predictions. He has in the past bet on these predictions. His betting attracted much interest in 1990, when his predictions of severe weather were met by a year of the "worst extremes".
WeatherAction was formerly listed company on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) as 'Weather Action Holdings plc' in 1997, and was transferred back to private ownership in 1999, primarily because of sustaining increasing losses and the impact of annual £70,000 costs related to listed status on annual revenues of £250,000. Corbyn reacquired the weather prediction business; the listed shell was taken over by investors and changed its name to 'InternetAction.com', with the intent of researching potential net-based takeover targets.
WeatherAction left the Alternative Investment Market in 1999 after reported losses of £480,000 incurred during its time as a public company; its share price dropped from 79p a share to 24p.
Prediction methods Corbyn's technique is stated to combine "statistical analysis of over a century of historical weather patterns with clues derived from solar observations." He considers past weather patterns and solar observations and sun-earth magnetic connectivity. However, meteorological studies show that such influences cause minimal impact on the Earth's atmosphere.
Scientific review The only study involving Corbyn's work published in a peer-reviewed journal was in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics (2001). Its investigation was limited to Corbyn's "likely damaging gale periods" predictions for the island of Great Britain for the period October 1995 – September 1997. Corbyn's enlisted work (carried out for a consortium of insurance companies) was only for the most likely periods of the strongest winds and specifically not a full forecast to include lesser winds:The Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, vol. 63, issue 1, January 2001, pp. 29–34: URL accessed 8 September 2015. DOI 10.1016/S1364-6826(00)00155-3
In a 1999 edition of Wired magazine, researchers Ian Jolliffe and Nils Jolliffe stated of Corbyn's predictions that:How Good Is He, Anyway? – Wired, Issue 7.02, Feb 1999 "It is unusual for most of the detail to be completely correct, but equally it is rare for nearly everything to be wrong… Some forecasts are clearly very good, and a few are very poor, but the majority fall in the grey area in between, where an optimistic assessor would find merit, but a critical assessor would find fault."
In a 2012 article in Wired titled "The Fraudulent Business of Earthquake and Eruption Prediction", Erik Klemetti, an assistant professor of Geosciences at Ohio's Denison University accused Corbyn of "cherry-picking" and said people who claimed to be able to forecast earthquakes were "faith healers of the geologic community and should be seen as such."
Media coverage Critics have pointed to inaccurate predictions, such as a white Easter in 1989,Feedback – 15 April 1989 – New Scientist (Subscription only) and "raging weather" in September 1997. WeatherAction predictions were contested by the Met Office in 2008."Prediction of −17 °C freeze cuts no ice with Met Office " Helen Pidd, The Guardian, January 2008
While he was Mayor of London, Boris Johnson repeatedly suggested that Corbyn might be correct in his denial of anthropogenic climate change.
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