Nutmeg's week: We need an inquiry into Pride in Surrey

This week Stephen Ireland, the founder of Pride In Surrey, was sentenced to a total of 30 years in jail for multiple child sexual abuse offences, including the rape of a 12-year-old boy. The boy, who was reported missing at the time, was drugged with crystal meth before the assault. Ireland then sent him photos of another Pride in Surrey organiser, David Sutton, and suggested they have a threesome. Sutton, who was also convicted of several child sexual abuse offences, was sentenced to four and a half years.

The role of councils, at least one MP, schools, the police, the media and, above all, Pride in Surrey itself, needs to be investigated to find out to what extent institutional failings enabled paedophiles to abuse. Was protecting an image of inclusivity prioritised over protecting children?

We wrote a detailed report about Stephen Ireland in March, and in particular how he used his LGBT activism to gain access to children. He was, for example, patron of the disgraced children’s charity Educate & Celebrate, he volunteered at a school radio station in which he had children in bondage gear as guests and was even writing children’s books at the time of his arrest.

However, new information has come to light. It wasn’t reported in March that Ireland had smoked a bong with the boy which was later found to have contained crystal meth. During the trial, Ireland said he was in a polycule in 2020 with Charlie Watts and teenage ‘pup play’ fetishist, Samuel Powell, and they smoked crystal meth together. Incredibly, Watts is now the CEO of Pride in Surrey and Powell, still only 22, has been named its safeguarding lead.

Additionally, we now know that multiple child safeguarding complaints were made about Pride in Surrey, and particularly Stephen Ireland, for at least five years before his arrest last year.

He set up a ‘helpline’ for struggling LGBT children, in which they would text him and he would call them back. A whistleblower has said Ireland refused to let anyone else speak to the children who messaged him. At the same time, Ireland’s personal social media and Pride in Surrey’s official social media were both celebrating fetishes.

This week Pride in Surrey admitted for the first time, in a poorly-written statement, that “concerns were raised” about Stephen Ireland in 2021 and 2023. It added they were “unrelated to the recent charges” (surely that makes it worse?) and were “investigated in line with our policies”. It doesn’t mention that it was probably Ireland who investigated the concerns as he appointed himself as head of safeguarding, which is in breach of safeguarding guidance as he was chair of the organisation at the time.

This wasn’t the only bizarre statement it released following the sentencing. It also dismissed both Ireland and Sutton as merely two ‘ex volunteers’, even though Ireland founded Pride in Surrey and ran it from inception up until his arrest last year.

A former Pride in Surrey trustee, Marion Harding, who is trained in safeguarding, says she raised issues internally but Pride in Surrey’s then chief operating officer, Lisa Finan-Cooke, who is now a Liberal Democrat councillor, dismissed her concerns. When Harding later confronted Ireland in 2021 (where?), she was ordered out of the room. Finan-Cooke then wrote to her, saying she had been reported to Surrey Police for ‘discriminatory behaviour’ and was barred from Pride. She then received a cease and desist letter, telling her not to talk about Pride in Surrey on social media.

Harding says seven volunteers left Pride in Surrey over child safeguarding concerns and six people contacted Surrey County Council about them. At least two borough councils and Guildford MP Zöe Franklin were contacted as well. However, she says, nothing happened.

In fact, since 2020, Pride in Surrey has received more than £140,000 from Surrey County Council – including £24,275 for the current financial year. Guildford Borough Council announced, weeks after Ireland’s conviction, that “Surrey Pride will be returning to Guildford” for a parade this September and provided a link to its website. Runnymede Borough Council gave Pride in Surrey the award for ‘Cultural Organisation Of The Year’ during Ireland’s trial. Lib Dem MP Franklin, who once sent a personal message of support on social media to Ireland, continued to promote Pride in Surrey after his arrest, and last month spoke about ‘trans rights’ in parliament.

Surrey County Council has also, in the last few days, quietly deleted this video in which Stephen Ireland talks to the council about fostering children, and this article, in which Ireland expresses gratitude for being given taxpayers’ money.

As well as his links with councils, until earlier this year, Surrey Police listed Pride in Surrey on its website as a ‘partner agency’. Pictures and videos of Ireland posing with officers in front of rainbow-coloured cars (paid for by the taxpayer) repeatedly appeared on social media. One Surrey resident says she was told by her council to report Ireland to the police, but she decided not to after seeing videos like this.

(Surrey Police and Crime Commissioner Lisa Townsend has said that there has been “significant change” at Surrey Police since a year before Ireland was arrested. She’s also urged residents to contact any organisation that currently works with Pride in Surrey to express their concerns).

Other institutions are clearly still captured. For example, the Surrey Federation of Women’s Institutes was asked on social media if it was still going to have a stall at the next Pride in Surrey event. It replied that it will, adding it believes that ‘robust steps’ have been taken to ensure no more children will be sexually abused.

However, perhaps the worst reaction to the sentencing came from the BBC.

Ireland was a high-profile figure who’d appeared dozens of times on BBC Radio Surrey, including at least once as a presenter, and on national BBC programmes such as BBC Breakfast. You might have thought that anyone getting a 30-year prison sentence for child rape might be a top story, let alone someone well-known who was embedded in various institutions.

But no. BBC News had correspondents in court ready to broadcast on LGBT issues at the time of his sentencing, but none of them attended his trial. One was there for the inquest into why a drag queen had died. It’s worth noting that BBC News has now covered the death of The Vivienne nearly 30 times since January, and when Ireland was convicted in March, BBC South East Today ignored the story and instead ran a piece about … a different drag queen who’d died. The other was for the attendance in court of a man accused of spreading slurry on the street a few hours before a Pride march was due to take place.

BBC News waited more than five hours to report on the story, didn’t put it on its homepage and didn’t tag it into any section other than ‘Addlestone’ and ‘Guildford’. The article, bizarrely, ended with a comment from Ireland’s lawyer that Ireland did not abuse his position at Pride in Surrey in order to commit the offences, which is at odds with what the judge said when summing up.

The lack of tagging meant that, for example, while the BBC News’ Pride section ran 50 stories in June (a tiny fraction of the total output about Pride produced that month by the corporation) none of them mentioned that two Pride organisers had been jailed for nearly 35 years for child sexual abuse offences. Stories it did cover included that a banner had been torn.

Even though the sentencing was announced at 3pm, BBC Radio Surrey didn’t mention Stephen Ireland until the next day, and even then he only made the third item on the breakfast news, with less than 30 seconds devoted to him. His considerable links to BBC Radio Surrey were not mentioned.

The rest of the media was not much better. Surrey Live, which has extensively promoted Pride in Surrey, got the name of the organisation wrong in the headline, and his sentence wrong, and didn’t tag the story in its Pride in Surrey section or even have it as a top story. Some other media outlets also wrongly stated Ireland had been jailed for 13 years, including The Independent, which put that in a headline underneath its own logo, which had been changed to the Pride colours.

Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to put trans activists in charge of your marketing after all

Elsewhere at the BBC

BBC News ran a story about a crafts festival in Suffolk. Not only is one of the stitchers, ‘Kate’, a cross-dressing man, but this was the third BBC News story he’d appeared in, since the middle of May (the other two were on a new roller disco and the Supreme Court ruling).

A ‘trans man’ was also shoehorned into a BBC Breakfast piece about road safety.

A story about two male penguins that had bonded in captivity included the line: “It’s fitting that it’s now, during Pride Month, when they’ve got more time to invest in their own relationship”.

A news story about the sentencing of a paedophile suggested he is a woman, but the BBC did amend it to reveal that he is actually a man - 19 hours after it was published.

After last week running a 30-minute documentary about cross-dressing men in the US military, this week BBC News ran a 2,500 word story about the hardships suffered by ‘Kate’. He was told he had to stop demanding everyone else call him ‘she / her’, and cut his hair if he wanted to carry on serving in the US military. This week’s documentary featured Jay Hulme, a ‘trans man’ who successfully brought a stalking claim against a preacher, resulting in a £350 payout. Jay is treated entirely as an innocent victim throughout the broadcast, which doesn’t mention her history of allegedly bullying people online, lying about them or posting hypersexual content.

Even aside from the trans angle, it was a terrible week for the BBC. Some senior staff were told to step back from their day-to-day duties after a chant for Jewish deaths was broadcast live. A script writer for Doctors was charged with carrying out an armed attack on an Israeli defence firm. And it was revealed that the former senior diversity manager at the BBC (for ten years) believes that the Jews were behind 9/11 and Jews have a ‘rat ideology’.

Capture the flag

There were a couple of stories this week that highlighted how captured our institutions really are. Reform UK became the largest party at Warwickshire County Council in May and quickly instructed its CEO, Monica Fogarty, to remove the Trans Pride flag from its building. She refused to do this until Pride month had ended, saying she “saw no reason” to take the flag down, despite being someone who is employed to do what councillors instruct her to do. It then emerged that she never even received the consent from the former councillors to fly the flag in the first place.

We also found out that an artist, Victoria Culf, who is gender critical, was told by a senior Watford council official that she was under a police investigation. This meant she was blocked from attending her own exhibition. However, police records have confirmed that no investigation took place. She’s suing the council.

It took Donald Trump in power for the USA to get more sane

The USA took another step on the road to sanity when the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) agreed to erase male swimmer William ‘Lia’ Thomas from the records in their female swimming division. Most notably, Thomas cheated his way to an American collegiate title in 2022 by claiming to be a woman and was also enabled to use female changing facilities according to UPenn policy at the time. All swimming records and titles in the women’s division have now been amended to show the actual record holder and title winner. Women whose swimming records and potential careers were damaged by being forced to compete against a man will receive personalised apologies from the university. Although UPenn chose to take this course of action, its hand was forced by the Trump administration, which concluded it had violated legal protections for women enshrined in federal civil rights law (Title IX), and therefore the rights of female athletes. UPenn has also agreed to adopt biology-based definitions of male and female, and not to allow men to compete in female athletic programmes again.

On the same day as the UPenn U-turn, the Riley Gaines Act came into effect in Georgia. This act will prevent boys and men from playing against girls and women in public schools and colleges. As Riley says, it was quite the successful day.

Any excuse to play this video again

One man who hasn’t yet got the memo about the end of men in women’s sports is Rhys McKinnon, who currently goes by the name Veronica Ivy (he was previously known as Rachel McKinnon). Rhys won a world championship cycling title in 2018 and cheated many women out of competitive places, titles and records before he got so out of shape even he couldn’t keep up the pretence of being an elite female athlete.

Since moving back to his native Canada from America after losing a tenured academic position, Rhys has been lying low. There was even speculation he’d detransitioned as a result of his many humiliations. There was also the matter of the arrest of the man he’d called his ‘platonic life partner’ for paedophilia offences in South Carolina. Rhys’s desire to cheat and win against women is such that even the combination of these embarrassing and horrifying events is not enough to deter him for long. He recently revealed he’s been training to compete in women’s golf and has qualified for the provincial team to represent the Canadian province of British-Columbia in a ‘female-only’ golf tournament.

And finally

You may remember that Amanda Jette Knox decided to move about 400 miles to be in a ‘transgender polycule’, because her cross-dressing husband was having an affair with another troon. She now goes by the name Rowan and her main partner appears to be the cross-dressing partner of the cross-dressing man her cross-dressing husband was sleeping with. His name is Dani and they’re setting up a ‘trans cafe’ together in Toronto later this year. She proudly announced she was off to march for trans activism with other likeminded troons, including him.

Unfortunately, he got mugged at the march.

See you next week!