What Did the BBC Know About LGBT Youth Scotland?

Rosie Millard's resignation is hugely important. Now Children in Need must reveal what checks it ran into LGBT Youth Scotland after the group's CEO was jailed for child abuse. If any...

The resignation of Rosie Millard as Chair of the Trustees of BBC Children in Need is a big deal. The Chair of Trustees of a charity is responsible for ensuring the organisation’s behaviour reflects its stated ethical values. If the Chair then resigns, as Millard just has, expressing outrage and disgust with that behaviour, it goes without saying the charity has a major problem.

It’s not as if Millard is some charity newby either or can be accused of a random clash of personalities. She’d been a trustee of various charities before she became Chair of Children in Need in 2018. That was only two years after its CEO Simon Antrobus was appointed with whom, by all accounts, she has had until recently a perfectly amicable working relationship.

In Rosie Millard, Children in Need gained someone with exactly the kind of connections and PR savviness it needed and which she’d built up during her high-profile career in arts journalism. In turn she put her shoulder to the wheel to help, unpaid, an organisation with outsize public profile and reach. One it’s worth emphasising does an immense amount of good.

As Children in Need’s website says,

“With your donations, we’re currently funding nearly 1,500 charities and children’s projects to the value of £91.5 million. In 2022/2023 we supported well over 400,000 children.”

Millard’s resignation can’t help but affect Children in Need’s ability to continue to raise funds so it cannot have been a decision she took without enormous regret. So why did she feel the need to do it? Some of the media coverage has made this story seem unnecessarily complicated.

Not least that by…an organisation called the BBC. I defy anyone to read this BBC account for example and not be baffled. I know I was and I’ve been writing about the organisation at the heart of this story for some time.

Yes, it’s our old friend LGBT Youth Scotland.

The good news is that this is actually a simple story. And hangs on an even simpler question. What did Children in Need really know about LGBT Youth Scotland when it started donating to it?

The BBC would eventually give the charity over £466,000. The first donation was for £24,000 and was made in November 2009. If you hold on to that date for the rest of this post everything will fall into place and Millard’s outrage will make perfect sense.

I know this because it was a thread of mine on Twitter/X earlier this year that set in train the series of events that led to Millard’s resignation.

In my thread I pointed out the link between the charity and Andrew Easton who in August was convicted of distributing images of child sex abuse and of communicating with someone online he thought was a boy of thirteen with a view to abusing him sexually.

The images Easton shared included some featuring the abuse of new born babies. Incredibly, this was not the first time this sick perversion had been linked to the story of ….LGBT Youth Scotland through the men who worked with it. I’ve written in detail about Easton both here and in an article for Spiked Online.

If you’ve read them you’ll remember that when he was convicted a number of people noticed there was one post Easton hadn’t deleted on his Facebook account. This was the one urging his friends to donate money to…. LGBT Youth Scotland. This was a cause that was close to his heart, said the man who was at the time he posted this comment busy exchanging ghastly images of children including babies being raped. What are the chances?

I can’t claim any investigative journalism genius for deciding to spend an hour or so googling every possible combination of the words ‘Andrew Easton’ and ‘LGBT Youth Scotland’. It was though only when I added the words ‘Young’ and ‘Trans’ that I struck paydirt. At the danger of repeating myself……what are the chances?

I then revealed on Twitter/X that Easton had worked on a youth project for LGBT Youth Scotland which produced…this.

Easton was credited as one of the writers of the Coming Out Guide for Trans Young People which was published in 2010.

My exposé was picked up by Marion Scott at the Sunday Post. Whether it was Marion’s article or my thread on Twitter that alerted Rosie Millard I don’t know. It seems she was already deeply concerned about the fact Children in Need had given hundreds of thousands of pounds to LGBT Youth Scotland and was proposing to give more.

I should emphasise that while Rosie follows me on Twitter and we’ve met each other three or four times at parties we’re not friends as such. We also haven’t talked to each other or exchanged messages about this affair.

All this is just to say I was as surprised as anyone else when Rosie spoke out in the aftermath of my thread. I hadn’t even realised Children in Need was a major donor to LGBT Youth Scotland but was delighted when they suspended donations.

It was Marion Scott’s article about the suspension that alerted me to the date that is the pivot round which this entire story revolves. A date that explains Rosie’s resignation. And one that has the potential to sink Children in Need if it is not careful.

November 2009.

Why is that seemingly unremarkable date so important?