The Charity That Shames Scotland's Elite.

There is only one convincing explanation why LGBT Youth Scotland has never been held to account for its child abuse scandals. Our political and cultural elite did everything they could to enable them.

Last week’s article in The Times about LGBT Youth Scotland’s latest paedophile scandal was a powerful indictment not just of Scotland’s charity sector but by implication our entire political and cultural leadership. Janice Turner’s calm, forensic analysis of the history of LGBT Youth Scotland could not disguise her sense of outrage about the apparent immunity the organisation has been gifted for almost two decades by the great and the good.

It’s worth pointing out in passing there might have been no article linking LGBT Youth Scotland to yet another abuser were it not for a thread I posted on Twitter/X on August 17th.

A few days before my thread, a 39 year old man called Andrew Easton had been convicted in Aberdeen of sharing child sex abuse images as well as trying to induce someone he thought was a 13 year old boy to have sex with him (thankfully it was an undercover cop he was talking to in the chatroom). At first, Easton’s link with LGBT Youth Scotland appeared rather tenuous.

The first clue came in an article about his case in The Press and Journal which featured a picture of Easton from his Facebook account. Keen-eyed observers tracked this image down online….only to discover it was accompanied by a curious message.

“For my birthday this year, I'm asking for donations to LGBT Youth Scotland. I've chosen this charity because their mission means a lot to me,”

I bet it does.

The post was the only one Easton had left accessible to the public. Everything else was either wiped or hidden. Was this reference to LGBT Youth Scotland a bizarre attempt to suggest there was another side to his character? An….err…charitable one? One that in his warped imagination outweighed the sharing of photographs and videos of child sex abuse, including of new born babies? Or was the post a note of defiance? Given what we know about LGBT Youth Scotland I tended to the latter conclusion.

Which is why I turned to some sleuthing and uncovered the fact that an Andrew Easton was also listed as one of the authors of a pamphlet published by LGBT Youth Scotland many years ago. It has since been erased from any site associated with the organisation but I found it lurking on an ageing website of East Ayrshire Council. The motto of the biggest football team in the area, Kilmarnock FC, is Confidemus or ‘We Trust’. And that is the problem with this story. Too many people …trusting too much.

At the end of ‘Coming Out: a Guide for Trans Young People’ is a photograph featuring four young people captioned with their names below including that of an…..Andrew Easton.

In my Twitter thread I said I’d written to LGBT Youth Scotland to ask them to confirm if this Andrew Easton was the same person as the convicted paedophile. At the time of his conviction Easton was 39. If it was the same person he’d have been 25 when the pamphlet was published in 2010, 14 years ago. Only one of the young people pictured seemed to fit that age; the man second from the right.

I was wrong about that and we’ll get to that shortly. Before we do you might be asking yourself why I was so interested in Andrew Easton and his potential link to a major Scottish charity?

Two reasons really. One is that if a man has just been convicted of paedophilia it raises the question of whether he might have viewed access to young people in the past as an opportunity. LGBT Youth Scotland’s work is aimed at 13-25 year olds. To say that wide age range is controversial is an understatement.

Either way, if the paedophile Easton worked for the charity might it have brought him into contact with children as young as that thirteen year old he imagined he was lining up for sexual abuse?

There’s another reason it was important to find out more about Easton and to get his timeline right. This pamphlet was published only a year after after one of the most traumatic trials in Scottish judicial history, which saw the conviction of the country’s worst ever child abuse ring. That ring was led by the then CEO of LGBT Youth Scotland, James Rennie, who among the 43 crimes of which he was found guilty, repeatedly abused a boy from the age of three months old and for nearly four years afterwards. Rennie was the god-parent of the child, the son of a couple who thought he was one of their best friends, and whom he betrayed in the worst imaginable way.

By the way, Rennie was “a key advisor on sex education to the Scottish Executive and lobbied strongly in favour of the introduction of gay adoption”

Of course he did.

Pity the child Rennie might have been allowed to adopt. While he was abusing the infant he babysat, he emailed other members of his abuse ring to discuss them one day joining him in the abuse. One did, the other ringleader Neil Strachan. He took a video which is so disgusting I’m not even going to describe it. Hell would be sullied by his and Rennie’s presence.

The point is Rennie’s crimes were so disgusting you would think in the aftermath of his trial LGBT Youth Scotland would have been, let’s just say, anxious to ensure no other paedophiles could darken its doorstep. Surely it would stop at nothing to ensure children were kept safe.

Personally, I’d have expected, say, a moratorium on its schools activity. By then the organisation was in charge of running LGBT History Month in schools all across Scotland. There are no gold stars today for guessing who convinced Education chiefs to hand that responsibility to LGBT Youth Scotland along with its access to thousands of children. Yes, baby-rapist James Rennie….

There was no moratorium on anything however. That’s why the pamphlet co-written by Andrew Easton is so interesting. It is the clearest proof there wasn’t even a brief pause in the organisation’s onslaught on schools. Take a closer look at The Coming Out Guide and it becomes clear it was actually written in late 2009. The same year as the trial of Rennie in May 2009.

Here’s one reference in the pamphlet to “just now (Winter 2009)”.

Rennie was convicted in May but his sentence not handed down until October 2009.

This means the pamphlet’s research was probably conducted while the trial was going on and it was certainly written just weeks at most (Winter 2009) after the charity’s CEO was sentenced amid a slew of appalled headlines. All this makes it all the more extraordinary then that the work was part of a national project the charity was running at the time called…… ‘Green Light’.

‘Green Light’ -a project let me repeat run by a charity that sent adults into schools to talk about sex and produced material for children as young as 13 years old- was funded by the Big Lottery Fund. They obviously didn’t reckon the fact the CEO of that charity had just been jailed for perverse sex crimes against children might mean ‘Green Light’ could be misconstrued.

We know that paedophiles use codes, signals and aliases to communicate. All these were a feature of Rennie’s trial, which we’ll come to soon. If Big Lottery Fund or LGBT Youth Scotland were truly keen to prevent the impression they were inadvertently signalling to abusers, why on earth would they call this organisation’s flagship project in the wake of his conviction for child abuse…. Green Light?

It’s just one small clue to a culture within LGBT Youth Scotland that suggests it could not possibly have taken safeguarding seriously at the time. Even in the wake of the most convincing evidence of the dangers of complacence: the jailing of its CEO.

There were other clues too both within the organisation and among the politicians who enabled its rise to prominence.

One of the reasons LGBT Youth Scotland, it seems, never genuinely felt the need to change its ways was the supine attitude of its parliamentary and regulatory overlords. I’m going to examine a debate that was held in Holyrood in honour of the organisation and Rennie in particular just two years before his arrest.

It reveals a culture among our political elite that paedophiles would be bound to exploit. A culture devoid of suspicion or critical thinking. One that gives gay men and LGBT+ organisations complete immunity from questions of child safeguarding.

To understand why this culture is so dangerous I’ll also examine how the Rennie child abuse ring was discovered. Spoiler alert it had nothing to do with Scottish officialdom’s child safeguarding policies never mind LGBT Youth Scotland’s ‘robust’ version of them.

Let’s start by analysing LGBT Youth Scotland’s reply to my email. See if you agree with me that it seems shot through with the kind of obfuscation that suggests the organisation is still not preparted to learn lessons.

It was the disgusting backstory of James Rennie that made me keen to find out whether the Andrew Easton who wrote one of the Green Light pamphlets was the same man who also went on to become a convicted paedophile. Of course I couldn’t be sure the two Eastons were one and the same.

Strange coincidences happen. After a Malcolm Clarke won an Oscar for his documentary short I was emailed congratulations by various friends. I assured them had I been nominated for an Oscar, never mind won one, they’d have heard by now.

LGBT Youth Scotland’s CEO Mhairi Crawford has now emailed me back and confirmed that the two Eastons are indeed the same person.

“You have correctly identified that the image is of the group of young people, including Andrew Easton who engaged in the resource. 

She also clarified though that,

Unfortunately however, you have incorrectly identified the young person in question”.

In my first post I’d magnified the face of the person who most resembled the older Easton. And while I didn’t explicitly state he was Easton I’m happy to correct any impression I might have inadvertently given.

But if he isn’t Easton who in the group picture is?

I followed up with another email to ask Crawford just that. Her reply seems typical of the lack of transparency of the organisation.

“I’m afraid I do not know which person in the photograph is Andrew Easton as I was not with the charity at the time and had never come across him until the recent news article. I was notified by a previous colleague that the part of the image that was highlighted was of a different young person.”

Mmm.

Imagine you are the CEO of LGBT Youth Scotland in the middle of a paedophile scandal and you’re contacted by a previous colleague who tells you a man in a photograph is NOT Andrew Easton. Wouldn’t you ask who in the photograph is? Not Ms Crawford it would seem.

She did however declare,

“Like, you, we were deeply troubled to learn of Mr Easton's criminal actions. We condemn anyone that exploits or harms young people.” 

I’m sure we are all relieved to hear that. The question is what she means when she says Andrew Easton “engaged in the resource”.

The pamphlet is clear it was written “through facilitated discussions held by LGBT Youth Scotland.” We are not told though how many young people were interviewed, whether Easton himself was interviewed or whether he did the interviewing nor what the exact role was of LGBT Youth Scotland staff. Never mind what “facilitated discussion” means.

In my reply to Crawford I’d made my best attempt at a helpful suggestion, advising her that she should issue a press release saying something along the lines of…

…. “you're upset by the Easton case (as you no doubt are) but it has acted as a reminder to us all of the overriding importance of child safeguarding. Paedophiles have always tried to latch on to any organisation that has access to children and young people. …You want to be assured that safeguarding is as robust as possible and constantly being improved and therefore you'll be commissioning x and y to report back to you that this is indeed the case and with any suggestions for improvements.

….I may not agree with the aims of your organisation but as long as it is actually going into schools everyone benefits from its activities being as safe as they can be.”

After the Sunday Post picked up on my thread in an article on the 25th of August, Crawford emailed a reply to that point.

This time she tried to reassure me with a link to a public statement the charity had now issued, defending its child safeguarding. This statement raised more questions than it answered. For a start it claimed that Easton, “has never been, at any point, an employee or volunteer with LGBT Youth Scotland.”

What would you call someone who had been described in an LGBT Youth publication as one of its writers? He had to have been a volunteer. At least. It seems unlikely though he would be completely unpaid for co-writing what is, after all, a 44 page document.

The release then went further and complained “his involvement in the resource has been misrepresented”. But wasn’t it LGBT Youth Scotland that said he wrote the document? On the actual document.

You might think I’m nitpicking but I think it’s worth drilling down like this. For one thing if an organisattion can’t be straight about the small things, can it be trusted to be straight about the big ones?

Also any organisation that tries to parse or wave away potential risks to children, even if they occurred decades ago is signalling that it prioritises its reputation. If it is willing to do that about safeguarding failings in the past, why would it not to do the same about ones now?

The other bigger reason it’s worth nitpicking is the one we’ve touched on already. The one that hovers in the background any time LGBT Youth Scotland hits the headlines. It’s the fact an actual child abuser was its leader for four seminal years. And despite that the charity never faced any consequences at all.

Had the jailing of a CEO for grotesque child abuse happened to any other youth organisation it would be front and center of their outlook now and dictate their response to any question of possible safeguarding failures. Yet there is no evidence of that at LGBT Youth Scotland. No mention on their website. No reference to it in their press statement about Easton. And frankly no sense they have ever taken its implications seriously. They behave indeed as if it never actually happened. Or if it did that it had nothing to do with them. Despite the fact he was accessing child abuse imagery from their offices.

James Rennie was appointed CEO of LGBT Youth Scotland in 2003. He began abusing his god-child in 2004. The child abuse network of which he was the ring leader stretched across the world to hundreds of men, in the US, the Netherlands and Poland. The Scotsman’s headline when he was finally convicted was “Horror upon horror that unfolded in 'worst ever' abuse trial”.

If you or I had found ourselves somehow accidentally involved in a small organisation where we’d inadvertently worked alongside a monster like him we’d probably become paedo vigilantes. Or disappear into a monastery to try to cleanse ourselves. Or I don’t know….become champions of stronger child safeguarding perhaps?

Yet….after Rennie was jailed the jobsworths at LGBT Youth Scotland didn’t do any of these things. Even more surprising there was no investigation by any regulatory authority into the charity run by a man who sent videos of himself abusing an infant to other depraved men. There wasn’t even a suggestion this charity might have its funding suspended if only temporarily by the Scottish government.

Instead everyone that mattered in the Scottish political and cultural elite simply took on trust a statement from LGBT Youth Scotland that slyly asserted,

"That there is no suggestion that James Rennie directly threatened the safety of young people accessing our services is due to the culture of child protection within the organisation, which is backed up by robust policies."

Where was the evidence to back this claim? The statement detailed no internal investigation, never mind one that called in independent experts from outside.

It’s strange above all what the charity didn’t say. It could have said that Rennie provided no advice directly to children or young people. That was the concern of Pink News when it covered the story in 2009. It pointed out that the offices where Rennie accessed abuse images ….also functioned as the charity’s advice centre.

Yet LGBT Youth Scotland did not refer to this. Was there an audit conducted by the police of all the young people who accessed their advice services? If so it was not mentioned. Did the charity conduct one of its own? It would surely have told us if it had.

The reason I often bang on about this scandal and LGBT Youth Scotland in general is a blood-chilling fact. It was down to pure luck that this child abuse ring was discovered. It had nothing to do with the scrutiny of internet firms. Or police monitoring. Never mind LGBT Youth Scotland’s allegedly world-class “culture of child protection” (sic). It was just one extraordinary act of carelessness on the part of Rennie’s co-conspirator, Neil Strachan, that lifted the veil. We can hardly expect every child abuser or network of abusers to do us the courtesy of accidentally revealing themselves next time.

In a gripping article about the investigation that brought Rennie down the journalist Mike Wade describes how this accident played a pivotal role. Wade says that in August 2007 Strachan sent his work computer to be repaired. What he didn’t realise was that he had left a hard drive attached. This was loaded with images that appalled first the young computer repairman and then the police officers he called in. Ten days later Strachan was arrested and a team of 13 detectives from Lothian Police began their attempt to disentangle a network of aliases connecting hundreds of perverts across Britain and beyond.

Wade writes,

“Chief among Strachan’s correspondents was another paedophile, who also disguised himself behind an alias. It soon became apparent that he too was a vicious criminal, a local man with access to a child who had to be caught quickly. That man was James Rennie, 38, a gay rights campaigner.”

Rennie used the microsoft-owned email address kplover@hotmail.com to connect to the child abuse websites he and Strachan created. Kp was a reference to “kiddie porn”. Naturally. With the arrest of Strachan, Rennie must have suspected the police were closing in on him but he covered his tracks so well he may have imagined he could stay beyond their reach.

It was perhaps a sign of his confidence that even as he knew the investigation was trying to find him, Rennie penned an article for a newly launched magazine: ‘Children and Young People Now’ in September 2007.

As the police scoured the internet looking for clues to his whereabouts, Rennie sounded off about homophobic bullying in schools. “Ignorance is the root of most discrimination”, opined a man who embodied worse behaviour than the worst stereotypes held about gay men by ignorant homophobes.

As an aside, I have discovered that the editor who commissioned Rennie to write that article was a man called Stovin Hayter. In addition to launching ‘Children and Young People’ magazine Hayter had previously been in charge of ‘Nursery World’. I think you can guess where this is going.

Yep. In 2018 Hayter was convicted of possessing child sex abuse films. Just like Andrew Easton he wasn’t jailed but given a suspended sentence.

We wouldn’t want to be cruel now would we…..

The same month that Rennie’s article reached all the eager subscribers of Children and Young People Now, Scottish police decided to call on US assistance and invoked the Mutual Assistance Treaty. This allowed the FBI to issue Microsoft with a “preservation order” forcing them to store any chatlogs and emails on Rennie’s account.

To find out who owned kplover the cops needed an IP address they could attach to a person but Rennie kept eluding them. That’s because when he was at home he accessed his account by piggybacking on the insecure broadband of various neighbours. Twice neighbours were raided.

It is an irony of a sort - and fitting- that Rennie’s Achilles Heel turned out to be the fact he also used his Microsoft account at the offices of LGBT Youth Scotland. When the police traced him to that location they only had to cross-refer everyone who used its offices with those who accessed the same account close to Rennie’s home. Only one name corresponded. Rennie was arrested on December 2007.

Rennie had by then led LGBT Youth Scotland for four years. It was a period that saw the fortunes of the charity transformed. Its funding from the Scottish government soared. It took on new permanent campaign staff. Rennie gave testimony to the Equalities committee.

The rush to give both him and the organisation effusive support was driven in large part by the fact that Scotland had led the way in getting rid of Section 28, which had prevented the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools. One of the first pieces of legislation at Holyrood was its abolition in 2000. Progressive Scots were mightily pleased with themselves that the country had beaten England and Wales by almost three years.

The fact that conservative forces (as they were described) had fought tooth and nail against the abolition of Section 28 made the victory even sweeter. LGBT Youth Scotland and Rennie himself were proof it was argued that the country had put its old hatchet-faced reactionary and intolerant self behind it. They had become- effectively- mascots of a new Scotland.

Now the establishment fell over themselves to allow LGBT Youth Scotland into schools. Any suggestion there might be risks or that some men might have sinister ulterior motives were dismissed. Not that old reactionary stuff again!

This meant that when Rennie was convicted, politicians and commentators were left with a dilemma. If they now questioned the LGBT agenda which his organisation advanced, and which they had wholeheartedly embraced, they risked being criticised for failing to ask questions previously. For perhaps being naive. Perish the thought.

Their defence was that no one could be blamed for not realising a public figure was a predator in disguise and so Rennie was waved off as a horrific aberration. But if LGBT Youth Scotland was investigated, put under special measures or thrown out of schools even temporarily that would lay politicians and civil servants open to claims they had not been scrutinising its work sufficiently.

If they were seen to be uncertain now about its safeguarding then they could be accused of having put children at risk in the past. Rennie was disowned, his agenda though was ringfenced and the organisation he turned into a hugely important political force remained immune from criticism.

The problem with this mindset is that it soon becomes a habit. In fact it develops its own momentum. The deliberate refusal to entertain suspicion about activists engaging with children about sexuality and “gender identity” means eventually it becomes difficult to draw any line.

The redoubtable Marion Scott at the Sunday Post revealed earlier this year that almost half of the children LGBT Youth Scotland now interact with in schools are on the spectrum or disabled.

What could possibly go wrong?

The Telegraph also reported recently that a Scottish school for severely autistic children as young as five was being supplied with propaganda from LGBT Youth Scotland that tells them they can change sex and that if they take hormone tablets they may feel happier.

In its rewrite of its Trans Coming Out Guide the organisation also informs teenage girls who think they are lesbians they may in fact be transgender.

By definition then activists from LGBT Youth Scotland are actively misleading vulnerable children. And encouraging physical self-harm. Doesn’t that feel like abuse? Yet it is being enabled and applauded by our political and cultural establishment.

They have form on that.

Nothing captures the incompetence and gullibility of our political class towards the activity of LGBT Youth Scotland and other such groups as much as a remarkable debate held at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh in 2005. In Holyrood’s public gallery was the brooding figure of James Rennie.

As one parliamentarian after another rose to praise LGBT Youth Scotland and Rennie in particular, the 33 year old could be forgiven for enjoying his triumph. He had only been at the helm of Scotland’s leading LGBT campaign group for two years.

Susan Deacon, a Minister in the ruling Labour government in Edinburgh, had barely opened the debate before paying tribute to Rennie.

“I am sure that colleagues will want to join me in welcoming to the public gallery, a number of visitors from LGBT Youth Scotland, including James Rennie…”

She went on to claim that those who had seen the work of LGBT Youth Scotland “cannot fail to be impressed by how effective it has been…”

Well…

Nora Radcliffe from the Liberal Democrats was keen to let everyone know she’d been in email contact with Rennie.

“I commend the excellent, highly competent leadership that LGBT Youth Scotland gets from Jamie Rennie and his team.”

As for the importance of its volunteers, she suggested

“As a society, we are so dependent on volunteering. It is like the beer that gets to places that other beers cannot reach.”

How unwittingly prophetic were her words.

For Rennie had indeed reached places others cannot reach.

As he sat basking in her praise only he and his circle of fellow child abusers knew that for almost a year he had been filming himself sexually abusing a baby boy.

There were two triumphs for Rennie being recognised in the debate. The first was an award that had recently been won by the volunteer team at LGBT Youth Scotland, for its contribution to…. err……“community safety”.

The Philip Lawrence Awards, named after a headmaster who was stabbed by a schoolchild in the 1990s, recognises “contributions to the community which bring out the best in young people”.

Tricia Marwick from the SNP got up to say of LGBT Youth Scotland, “the work they do is amazing and I cannot praise them enough.” The organisation “deserves all our congratulations and support” because it “helps young people at their most vulnerable.”

Well….

Elaine Murray, from Labour was delighted the organisation was going to be running an event in her constituency.

She was “particularly impressed” that the group “will not just pay for the accommodation for young people under 26 in friendly bed and breakfasts in Dumfries, but will help with their travel costs and that the event is completely free to the young people who are taking part.”

Well…

Patrick Harvie who congratulated “my friends at LGBT Youth Scotland” hoped that as discrimination “becomes more trivial, the identity that was formed in the first place by the oppression begins to blur around the edges and sexual identity is no longer so fixed.”

I bet James Rennie was nodding in agreement.

Johann Lamont of Labour who now has a much clearer sense of the risk posed by dodgy organisations like LGBT Youth Scotland made the link between the bad old days of Section 28 and the fact she was announcing that evening a shed load of new money for the organisation. “We consider it to be a key partner in delivering our equality strategy…” She also announced that Scotland would be recognising LGBT History Month for the first time that month.

Of course with the wisdom of hindsight it’s easy to look back and ridicule people who didn’t know then what we know now. That is not the point of my bringing up these embarrassing quotes. The point is many of these perfectly intelligent people assumed that some sort of basic safeguarding had been done. It hadn’t.

Even worse some of them in their wild enthusiasm for a new and more inclusive Scotland concluded the old suspicions were a bit boring, old-fashioned and a little declassé. They aren’t.

That attitude has become engrained though. Today too many politicians, regulators, civil servants, journalists and commentators assume, just as Scottish politicians did during that debate in 2005, that someone else is making sure predators don’t exploit the free for all in which LGBTQ+ activists roam at will through hospitals, schools and care homes or trundle around town in cop cars waving at the locals.

James Rennie should have been a wake up call. It wasn’t and instead LGBT Youth Scotland was left untouched and unscrutinised. If it or another LGBT organisation shames Scotland in another paedophile scandal our political class will know who to blame. Themselves.