If the BBC is your only source of news, you will probably be unaware that Stephen Ireland—one of the UK’s most vocal trans-activists—has been convicted of raping a 12-year-old boy, along with ten other counts of child sexual abuse.

Ireland was involved in several LGBT organisations and is probably best known as being the founder and face of Pride in Surrey, and as a patron of the disgraced children’s charity Educate & Celebrate. His partner at the time of his arrest, David Sutton, a senior volunteer at Pride in Surrey, was found guilty of four separate offences, three of which were related to child sexual abuse. The men were tried together and they pleaded guilty to five other sexual abuse images counts. A detailed report about the duo’s crimes can be found here.

Here he is using his position to talk to a child about sex with people who are HIV positive. During the trial, it emerged that he is HIV positive himself and had a fantasy about infecting children with HIV.

Ireland’s story is maybe the clearest case yet of a predator exploiting relaxed attitudes to child safeguarding because he was operating under the cover of LGBT, and specifically trans, inclusion. In his efforts, he was enabled by institutions—including the BBC, the police, and a chorus of celebrities—every step of the way.

One such celebrity is singer Hazel Dean, patron of Pride in Surrey, who regularly attended events with Ireland. She responded to the verdict by admitting that he used Pride and charity work ‘as a distraction’ in order to carry out ‘disgusting activities’. Her words might have carried more weight if it wasn’t for the fact that her very next post on Facebook was about drag queens performing at Pride, with the hashtag ‘#PrideFamily’, a phrase Ireland often used.

Ireland, 41, was desperate for fame. He was reportedly chosen to be a contestant on Big Brother in 2007 (although he never made it to the screen) and did appear on Sky’s Fat Families in 2010. He also worked in various capacities and locations for Sky between 2006 and 2019.

During this time he married a man who went on to say he was a woman, and the couple became a ‘throuple’ when they introduced the much younger Charlie Watts to the relationship. They then introduced a fourth person to the arrangement before Ireland and Watts became a couple - and set up Pride in Surrey together in 2018. In 2020 they became a throuple again, as student Sam Powell, a BDSM fetishist who was into ‘pup play’, entered the relationship.

Pride in Surrey

This trio ran Pride in Surrey. Ireland as chairman and the main public face of the organisation, Watts was CEO and Powell a volunteer manager. We discovered during the trial that the trio smoked crystal meth together. In either 2022 or 2023, Watts and Powell became a couple, and Ireland entered a relationship with David Sutton, who was also given a senior role at Pride in Surrey.

Incredibly, Watts and Powell still run Pride in Surrey today. In fact, the day before the guilty verdict, Runnymede Borough Council gave Pride in Surrey the award for ‘Cultural Organisation Of The Year’ for Stephen Ireland’s brainchild, Pride Hub. Watts and Powell collected the award, with children present.

Pride Hub, incidentally, is a ‘venue for the LGBTQI+ community and allies to meet, socialise and access valuable services.’ It offers refreshments, games and access to lube and condoms.

As chairman of Pride in Surrey, Ireland was not shy about his trans activism. He regularly attacked and tried to cancel women such as JK Rowling and Surrey Police and Crime Commissioner Lisa Townsend, particularly if they had expressed child safeguarding concerns. He also communicated directly with children through both his personal social media accounts and the official Pride in Surrey platforms. These conversations were typically about sex, at one point encouraging a confused 16-year-old girl to ‘transition’ and engage in fetishes.

Later he published an image of her in a ‘pup’ outfit at a Pride event, holding a dog lead attached to a collar around her neck.

Pride in Surrey’s response to the guilty verdict was to post on Facebook that Ireland was merely an ex-volunteer. This is disingenuous. The content of his Facebook timeline reveals consistent self-promotion, persistent outreach to minors, and multiple attempts to suppress women’s safeguarding concerns.

It also password-protected its website, making it significantly harder for the public to identify who works there. Here’s what it’s hiding.

Several former senior officers at Pride in Surrey, including two former trustees, have said they left the organisation as unspecified concerns they raised - prior to the abuse we now know about - were ignored or even resulted in whistleblowers being bullied.

Another has claimed that staff have known about concerns since 2021.

Local politicians

One of the ex-trustees says she informed both Surrey County Council and Guildford Borough Council about Pride in Surrey, but they ignored her. In fact, Surrey County Council gave the organisation nearly £100,000 between the years 2020 and 2022.

There are political connections between Stephen Ireland and the Liberal Democrats. One Surrey MP is Zoe Franklin, a former Guildford councillor, who repeatedly promoted Pride in Surrey and sent supportive messages to Ireland. Two other Pride in Surrey officers, one the chief operating officer and the other the head of PR, are both Lib Dem councillors. They also both work in childcare.

The media

Ireland seems to have been loved by parts of the mainstream media, and even got a book deal. So far, the Guardian has failed to mention that one of their 100 most powerful people in Pride has since been convicted of child rape.

Local media Surrey Live has a Pride in Surrey section featuring more than 90 articles, many of which were interviews with Ireland. Yet they gave limited coverage to the arrests, charges, trial and verdict. Only one article made it into that section - and that was Pride in Surrey distancing itself from Ireland. In the untagged articles about Ireland’s crimes it did publish, Pride in Surrey was conspicuously absent from headlines or opening lines. Not only that, just as the trial was about to start, Surrey Live ran a promotional piece for Pride in Surrey 2025.

The BBC frequently collaborated with Ireland, at one point even allowing him to take over BBC Surrey (radio) for an evening (Ireland was one of the main presenters on Trans Radio UK, along with football referee ‘Lucy’ Clark).

Despite this, there was barely any mention of his conviction on the BBC. The story became the latest paedophile Pride organiser not to make the BBC’s Pride section. It didn’t even get a mention on BBC South East Today, which instead - on the day of the guilty verdict - devoted several minutes to a drag queen who had died.

Surrey Police

In the video above, Ireland gets into a police car which has been painted in rainbow colours and is chauffeured away. In fact there are several images of him with Surrey Police over the years. But perhaps most concerning is that on June 6, 2024, Surrey Police LGBT+ tweeted that it had attended a school to take part in ‘Pride engagement’ work, and tagged Pride in Surrey into the tweet. Hazell Dean said she last saw Stephen Ireland and David Sutton on June 6, 2024, at a Pride event. We initially were told Ireland was arrested on June 12, 2024 but since the trial it has emerged that police found indecent images of children on his phone in April 2024.

Educate & Celebrate

Educate & Celebrate was a charity which offered ‘LGBT+ diversity training’ to organisations, particularly schools. Schools could achieve bronze, silver or gold awards from the charity by adapting their language, teaching materials, policies and staff training to Educate & Celebrate’s satisfaction (for instance, teaching children and teachers to say ‘pupils’ instead of ‘girls and boys’),. The overt aim of the programme was to ‘embed gender, gender identity and sexual orientation into the fabric’ of organisations. The ‘bottom line’, according to CEO, the ‘non-binary’ Dr Elly Barnes MBE, who has an honorary degree from Goldsmith’s, was to ‘smash heteronormativity’. This was to be achieved by teaching children as young as three that ‘not everyone identifies as heterosexual or as male or female and there are many people that identify outside of that model.’

Unsurprisingly, Educate & Celebrate was a huge grift. As Transgender Trend discovered, membership of the scheme cost £50 per school, while access to the PRIDE Youth Network was £200. Online staff training was £400 and a day’s Pride workshop was £500.

‘For £1,750 your school could join the PRIDE in Inclusion Award Programme which will buy, among other things, online and face-to-face support for a year… Or schools could buy in just the CPD training, the price is negotiable, where staff will “develop a deeper understanding of sexual orientation, gender and gender identity, why it is necessary to include these protected characteristics in our curriculum…”’

As with Stonewall, legal falsehoods, such as the conflation of sex and gender in the Equality Act (2010), were common in Educate & Celebrate’s teaching materials.

In 2014 the charity was awarded £214,000 by the Department for Education to promote its work on ‘eradicating homophobia, transphobia and biphobia in schools’.

In its time as a charity, Educate & Celebrate was beset by controversy. It emerged that it had lied about being officially recognised by Ofsted on publicity materials, which was eventually confirmed by Ofsted about a year later. Reverend Bernard Randall was sacked and reported to national counter-terrorism strategy Prevent simply for refusing to chant ‘smash heteronormativity’ during an Educate & Celebrate training session led by Elly Barnes in a boarding school. Its teaching materials, which included a book about a child who ‘transitions’ at the age of three, were continually exposed as inappropriate.

And then came its patrons, including Stephen Ireland, Peter Tatchell and Jordan Gray.

Jordan Gray, a man who pretends to be a woman, was removed as a patron of the charity after flashing his penis on a live television show while singing a comedy song about why he is better than actual women. In the ensuing controversy, the charity released a statement claiming it believed Gray had ‘never gone into schools’ on their behalf. This statement contradicted Gray’s own claim that he’d gone into schools to ‘talk about gender’, and ‘toddlers kind of get it straight away’. Gray can be seen here talking to Stephen Ireland about exposing children to gender ideology. Notice how Ireland moves the conversation swiftly from children understanding sexuality and gender identity topics ‘on a spiritual level’, to ‘pups’ and kink in Pride events.

The drag Queen Miss Tess Tickle, known for his x-rated act and costumes, also represented the charity while appearing in schools in full drag.

The board of trustees, which was responsible for appointing patrons such as Ireland, Peter Tatchell (famous for his letter about why child-adult sexual relationships are not necessarily a bad thing), Gray and Tess Tickle, was led by Julie Bremner. Like Elly Barnes, she is a woman who seems to specialise in enabling dangerous or inappropriate men who want access to children in order to ‘mould’ them (erase their boundaries) at a young age. Bremner is a senior civil servant, school governor and the founder of Norwich Pride, whose work involves sending people into schools to provide LGBT awareness. It’s either a case of profound negligence regarding safeguarding—or a knowing disregard for it.

Educate & Celebrate suddenly and unexpectedly closed, apparently voluntarily, and was dissolved by the Charity Commission in 2024. It was thought to have worked closely with at least 100 schools in the UK, many of whom still display their bronze, silver or gold awards proudly on their websites, alongside photos of workshops and assemblies led by Educate & Celebrate trainers. Throughout its time, Stephen Ireland repeatedly promoted its work.

This is only a snapshot of the work Stephen Ireland put in to groom not just children but organisations that worked with children. Clearly, Pride in Surrey needs to be disbanded immediately, and investigations carried out into at least the allegations its former trustees have made. Educate & Celebrate now also needs to be properly investigated. Putting Stephen Ireland in prison is not enough. Without a deeper reckoning, the networks he groomed will remain—and so will the threat to children."