Radical thinkers Key players in the environmental movement

Simon Bramwell,

46, is a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion

(XR), from

Stroud, Gloucestershire, and a former builder.

He was part of a 12-strong group of middle-class activists who admitted bringing the M4 and A4 to a standstill by lying down on a stretch of the motorway.

He was sentenced in 2016 over the protest against the expansion of Heathrow.

He has been repeatedly arrested for climate change and anti-fracking protests. Roger Hallam, 52, a PHD student who led rent strikes at UCL and went on hunger strike in protest at King’s College fossil fuel investments, is a founder of XR and part of the Rising Up! collective of activists from militant groups Occupy, Earth First and Reclaim the Power.

He is a key strategist of civil disobedience and law breaking, and has said: “We are going to force the governments to act.

“And if they don’t, we will bring them down and create a democracy fit for purpose.

“And yes, some may die in the process.” Gail Bradbrook, 47, a mother of two, is one of the directors of private limited company Compassionate Revolution, which has organised and partly financed XR.

The “neo-pagan” said on a recent podcast that she decided to become an activist as a direct result of taking huge doses of two powerful psychedelic drugs.

She said the drugs “rewired” her brain and gave her “the codes of social change”.

Afterwards, she ended her marriage and began her activism in XR. Tamsin Omond, 35, is a veteran of “direct actions” such as Occupy London, the poverty protest which set up a camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral in 2011.

She is the granddaughter of Dorset baronet Sir Thomas Lees.

She attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where she read English.

Ms Omond was thrown out of the anti-aviation group Plane Stupid after saying that the green movement “brand” was “unwashed, unshaven and up a tree”.