The dark truth about LGBT Youth Scotland

The biggest LGBT organisation in Scotland is in trouble again. In the past few years, LGBT Youth Scotland has been accused of pushing gender-identity ideology on severely autistic primary-school kids. It has been caught promoting the idea of being nonbinary to disabled youngsters. It has even faced calls to be banned from classrooms altogether, after it lobbied to reverse Scotland’s ban on puberty blockers. Incredibly, these are not even the worst scandals to have hit LGBT Youth Scotland.

Last month, 39-year-old Andrew Easton was convicted in Aberdeen of distributing indecent images of children, ranging in ages from newborn babies to 10 years old. He even tried to convince someone he thought was a 13-year-old boy to send him explicit pictures online. Luckily, his ‘victim’ was actually a police officer.

Lo and behold, I discovered an Andrew Easton also happened to have co-authored a pamphlet for LGBT Youth Scotland in 2010. The pamphlet for schools, called Coming Out, was aimed at helping trans young people explain their newfound identity. Strikingly, it was relatively tame compared with the material this bizarre organisation now pumps into Scottish schools.

Last month, I challenged LGBT Youth Scotland’s CEO, Mhairi Crawford, to confirm whether or not the two Andrew Eastons were one and the same. A few days later, she replied and acknowledged they were. However, in a press statement, LGBT Youth Scotland insisted Easton neither worked for the organisation nor was a volunteer there.

How someone can write a pamphlet for an organisation and not be a volunteer or paid worker remains a mystery. The pamphlet itself clearly states it was co-written by Easton ‘through facilitated discussions held by LGBT Youth Scotland’. Crawford has since admitted that Andrew was a member of the youth group, where he, among others, contributed to the Coming Out guide.

Perhaps LGBT Youth Scotland was so keen to distance itself from Easton because it already has so many other skeletons in its closet. The most infamous example is former CEO James Rennie. In 2009, he was jailed for 14 offences, including producing child pornography and molesting a young boy from the age of just three months old. The crimes took place while he was CEO.

From 2003 until his arrest in 2007, Rennie was a leading figure in Scottish LGBT rights. He even became a regular feature at the Scottish parliament, where he was a government adviser. All the while, he was a ringleader of Scotland’s biggest child-abuse network, sharing disgusting images from the LGBT Youth Scotland offices. Those same offices were where the charity offered advice to troubled children and young people.

You might assume that, after Rennie was jailed, the Scottish equivalent of the Charity Commission, the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR), would carry out an investigation. Perhaps the millions of pounds that LGBT Youth Scotland receives in public funds might have been suspended until the Scottish government saw the results of that investigation. Instead, there was nothing. Not even a raised voice or a tut-tut.

Everyone that mattered in the Scottish political and cultural establishment simply took on trust a statement from LGBT Youth Scotland, which 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.’

Strangely, the charity did not provide any evidence to back up this claim. There appears to have been no proper internal investigation, never mind one that called in independent external experts. Was there an audit conducted by the police of all the young people who accessed its 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.

Thankfully, the story of Andrew Easton has received more attention. It has been front-page news and led to both Children in Need and Edinburgh Council withdrawing their financial backing.

The timing of Easton’s involvement raises further questions about LGBT Youth Scotland’s safeguarding abilities. The Coming Out guide was seemingly written in the winter of 2009, shortly after Rennie was sentenced in October. Clearly, LGBT Youth Scotland didn’t even take time to pause and regroup after suffering the worst imaginable scandal for a youth charity. The fact that it interacts with children as young as 13, the target range of Easton’s sexual perversion, only underlines this impression of complacency.

If LGBT Youth Scotland behaved as if it were immune from criticism, that might be because, to a large extent, it was. For years before Rennie’s conviction, politicians had been singing its praises and spending lavishly on it. In 2004, the charity was given an award for, ironically, ‘community safety’. A year later, Rennie and his charity were being congratulated for this in Holyrood by various politicians.

Then SNP MSP Tricia Marwick praised Rennie’s organisation for ‘helping young people at their most vulnerable’. Nora Radcliffe from the Liberal Democrats went on to ‘commend the excellent, highly competent leadership that LGBT Youth Scotland gets from Jamie Rennie and his team’.

Even after Rennie was jailed, both the Labour and SNP governments increased funding for LGBT Youth Scotland. It was almost as if the Scottish liberal elites had to prove nothing was amiss. After all, they had opened the doors of Scottish schools to the group when they gave it the responsibility of running LGBT History Month. They had even allowed it to shape sex-education policy.

Perhaps the most frightening thing of all is that Rennie’s horrific child-abuse ring only came to light by accident, when one of its members sent his work computer to be repaired. Who knows what other safeguarding disasters might be brewing unobserved in the menagerie of other poorly regulated LGBT organisations that politicians love to applaud.

There is only one convincing explanation as to why LGBT Youth Scotland escaped accountability for its child-abuse scandals for so long – because it had the fulsome backing of Scotland’s political elites.

Malcolm Clark is a TV producer. Visit his substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.