Trans activist at Stock protest is daughter of four-day-week official

THE trans activist who disrupted a talk by Prof Kathleen Stock is the daughter of a council boss who introduced a fourday working week.

Riz Possnett’s mother Liz Watts was working on a PhD thesis on the topic when South Cambridgeshire district council became the first to implement a trial to cut hours while staff remain on the same pay last year.

Robert Possnett, the 19-year-old’s father, is an Extinction Rebellion protester who has been arrested a number of times. Following in his footsteps, Possnett was removed by police after she glued a hand to the floor of the Oxford Union as the debating society heard from Prof Stock, a gender critical feminist, on Tuesday.

Sir John Hayes, Tory MP and chair of the Common Sense Group, has questioned whether the student activist had gone “off the rails” because she came from a “deranged bourgeois liberal family, blinded by privilege”. Possnett, who was involved in a band called “Working Class Broccoli”, lives in a Suffolk village in a five-bedroom family home with a swimming pool estimated to be worth £850,000.

Possnett studied at the Hockerill Anglo-European College in Hertfordshire, where boarding fees are more than £15,000 a year, and then in Hong Kong at the Li Po Chun United World College, where overseas students pay more than £40,000 a year, before beginning a course in philosophy, politics and economics at Wadham College, Oxford.

Ms Watts is paid a similar amount to the Prime Minister, taking home £156,199 in 2020/21 for her role as the council’s chief executive.

It is unclear what her latest salary was, as her four-day-a-week council has filed its accounts late, stating it was because of the impact of the pandemic on staff availability.

Mr Possnett, once a Lance Corporal in the parachute regiment, now displays a more radical side, describing himself on his social media as an “Extinction Rebellion activist” and expresses “solidarity with BLM and the Global South” and has promoted Just Stop Oil action.

The business development manager has been arrested a number of times, including for spraying red paint on the doors of London’s Guildhall in August 2021, an act for which he says he is “looking forward to my day in court”.

The ardent Remainer has also disrupted council meetings, handed himself in at a police station asking to be arrested, and glued himself to a Brexit Party bus during the 2019 election campaign. A source from South Cambridgeshire said: “They must be Britain’s looniest family, whose brains have been replaced by Left-wing social media bandwagons. They are not idealists but ideologues. Unfortunately, the long-suffering residents of South Cambridge have to suffer the consequences. There is clearly no ideology too crazy for them to embrace.”

The family said that they would not be commenting when approached by the Telegraph on Thursday, leaving it unclear how owning a swimming pool fits with Mr Possnett’s eco-credentials.

But he has spoken to describe himself as a “proud dad” on social media after Possnett posted an image of the protest at the Oxford Union.

Possnett, who uses the pronouns they/them, has pulled a number of high-profile stunts, including jumping the barriers at Windsor Castle to pose on the King’s bed with a copy of the Duke of Sussex’s memoir Spare. This week, the student attempted to disrupt a debate involving Prof Stock, 50 a former philosophy professor who resigned from her post at Sussex University in 2021 after a campaign of intimidation by trans rights activists. Possnett was removed by police but later de-arrested.

Responding to details of the family’s wealth, Possnett said on Twitter: “I am (sadly) not as rich as they make me out to be! That being said, I have never denied the privilege I have experienced. I have never had to worry about where the next meal will come from, or whether the heating will come on.”