Piers Corbyn is one of those people who are like a stopped analogue clock, right twice a day. He’s probably correct in his view that the contribution of humanity to climate change may have been overstated and he is looking increasingly correct in his opposition to lockdowns, a policy that has failed to contain covid and which is a policy that has failed at great social and economic cost.

However on many other issues Piers Corbyn is wrong and he can be proven to be wrong. He’s wrong to back the 5G conspiracy theory that claims that illnesses are either caused or worsened by the very low power centimetre and millimetre wavelengths used by 5G telecommunications. These frequencies contain no ionising radiation of the sort that can harm the human body, those frequencies are found above those of visible light in the form of X and gamma rays. The sorts of frequencies that are proposed for 5G are way way below those of visible light and in normal use will be relatively harmless. I’ve been around radio in some form or another since the mid 1980’s and I understand that with radio waves Newton’s Inverse Square Law applies. It is indeed dangerous to stick ones head inside a microwave horn antenna kicking out hundreds of watts or work in close proximity to a UHF TV transmitter on full power, which is why when this equipment needs to be worked on, they are either shut down or put on reduced power. At normal distances and in normal circumstances radio waves are pretty harmless because the further you move away from a transmitter the weaker the field strength of the signal is as Newton’s Inverse Square Law states.

Piers Corbyn is also a known anti-vaccination advocate, which is also a position that I do not share. This is because I am old enough to have seen the truly awful effects of diseases that can be prevented by vaccination and to have spoken to people who have suffered from illnesses that are now more or less vanquished in the West. My child lives and is healthy to a large extent because of vaccination. Unlike my parents and grandparents generation I do not have to worry for my child about diseases like smallpox, diphtheria, polio, whooping cough, measles, rubella, mumps or rotavirus. I am free of such worries because of vaccination. I have about as much time for the wibblings of anti-vaxxers as I have for those who believe that HM Queen is a shape shifting lizard, which is not much time at all.

However the way to deal with the Piers Corbyns of this world is not to silence them by arrest as happened recently in London, but to allow them to speak, to allow them to put their ideas to the test and argue against them in the public square whether that square be physical or digital. Silencing them via arrest or other legal process is counterproductive and can have the effect of turning the arrested speaker into some sort of martyr. It is far better in my view to allow these anti-vax or 5G fraggles to speak their brains and counter their views with more solid and factual information. Yes of course I understand the argument that not everyone will be swayed by the facts and will continue to believe the guff put out by the likes of Piers Corbyn with regards 5G and vaccines, but this is in my view less of a moral risk than turning them into martyrs for their cause. As Ben Shapiro once said, the only proper cure for bad speech is not speech restrictions but more speech.

The danger posed by silencing people, even those who are a bit ‘out there’ is a huge one. Not only do you risk creating martyrs for a cause, but you also solidify the views of those who are already believers in stuff like anti-vax or the 5G conspiracies. Enforcement action such as was taken over Piers Corbyn’s use of Holocaust imagery to promote his anti-vax views, which is what he was arrested for, does not make such views go away, but merely drives them underground into echo chambers that cannot be reached by open debate. It is far better in my view to let bad actors speak and prove themselves to be bad actors than to imprison them in echo chambers where no challenge comes to them.

This argument is why I’m vehemently against laws that criminalise Holocaust Denial as I’d rather such idiots were out there in the open where I can argue back at them and challenge them than have them compressed into echo chambers where they end up becoming more and more radical in their views. Free speech, as I’ve said before on here, is the best weapon around for dealing with such deluded people. Also by allowing such individuals to speak and be challenged whilst it may not be possible to change the minds of those who are the progenitors of such views, open debate does allow opposing views to be put before those who may be tempted to follow fact free fraggles and quite possibly change their minds. For example: The main reason to debate a far Leftist in public is not to make the far Leftist you are debating change their mind, that may be all but impossible with someone who has incorporated their ideology deeply within themselves, but to make them look foolish to the audience. This is a policy that worked with regards to Nick Griffin of the British National Party who was allowed to appear on the BBC’s Question Time programme and who did a damned good job of discrediting himself in the eyes of the public. If the BBC had followed the demands of the far Left and excluded him from the programme, then he would never have had the opportunity to contribute to his own political demise.

Do I find Piers Corbyn’s attempt to equate a vaccination programme with the industrial mass murder of Jews in death camps such as Auschwitz offensive, well of course I damned well do. It is not only offensive but wildly inaccurate. However, I see stuff that offends me every day and I take the view that the way to deal with such material is to either throw it in the bin, either a physical or digital one, or argue back and sometimes mock those who produce such material. I would never dream of involving the law to censor the nutcases who produce the material that I find inaccurate and offensive and I take this view because of two main reasons. The first is that if I call for the censorship of the voice of my opponents or those who have offended me, then it’s quite likely that at some point in the future those laws and rules that I have used to censor others will come back and bite me on the arse and I’ll ended up censored in turn. The second reason is that silencing the speaker of bad or false words does not make their opinions go away, it just puts them out of reach when it comes to challenging them.

The arrest of Piers Corbyn on Communications Act charges is likely going to be woefully counterproductive. The British state has made a martyr of someone who a lot of people laughed at and thereby given more power to a man who is quite frankly little more than a troll. The State has forgotten that the way to deal with trolls is to either ignore them or go out and counter their views. I suspect that this action against Piers Corbyn will harm his reputation among his followers not one jot and may even garner him more followers who will follow him because they take the view that if Corbyn is being silenced then he must be onto something that the government want to hide. Those who received a Corbyn ‘vaccines = death camps’ leaflet should have just put them in the bin or laughed at the idiocy of the leaflet and not involved the police. This is because by doing so they’ve given Piers Corbyn a level of publicity that he both does not deserve nor could afford to pay for.

A far more effective way of dealing with Corbyn’s vaccine knobwittery would have been to put him on a debate panel with those who are truly knowledgable about the subject of vaccinations and allow him to destroy himself. Sadly that’s not the way that either the government or some campaigning groups have gone. Instead of pushing Corbyn to the front and mocking him and challenging his views, they’ve handed him more power to gain more support.

I would like to conclude with some words that were recently said by the Libertarian commentator Old Holborn. He said: ‘Also, if we’re going to start arresting nutters like Piers Corbyn, the jails are going to burst.’ It’s difficult to disagree with that point. Personally I’d rather see our gaols filled with genuinely dangerous criminals rather than those like Piers Corbyn who express views that some find offensive, inaccurate or just plain stupid.