‘If the council had listened to me, this paedophile would have been stopped’
"When Marion Harding contacted the chief executive of Surrey County Council in 2021 to raise safeguarding concerns about her local Pride organisation, she expected a speedy response.
After all, the council itself had given Pride in Surrey tens of thousands of pounds in funding, and her concerns were about the protection of potentially vulnerable young people who came into contact with the LGBTQ organisation, which was set up in 2018 by local activist, Stephen Ireland.
Harding, 62, and her wife, Cathy, 59, had volunteered for Pride in Surrey, but both had a number of worries about Ireland’s conduct, not least that he had appointed himself head of safeguarding – a role that, according to guidance for voluntary bodies, should “not be the most senior person in the organisation”.
Ireland had sole responsibility for the group’s LGBTQ “helpline” for young people – meaning he had direct access to vulnerable children.
Volunteers were also concerned that Ireland appeared to be in a polyamorous relationship involving a young man, and that social media posts by Pride in Surrey celebrated “fetishes” – some involving young people – while Ireland was in charge.
Harding wrote to Joanna Killian, the chief executive of Surrey County Council, outlining some of her concerns, including that Ireland was in a relationship with a young man “who is barely 18”, in what amounted to an “abuse of power from a person in a position of trust, and could cause the wrong message to go out to young, vulnerable gay people”...
Stephen Ireland, 41, was convicted at Guildford Crown Court of raping a 12-year-old boy, along with additional counts of causing a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity, sexual assault and making indecent images.
His partner David Sutton, 27, a volunteer at Pride in Surrey, was convicted of offences including making indecent photographs and possessing extreme pornographic images.
Both were also found guilty of voyeurism and perverting the course of justice by deleting phone data after becoming aware of the investigation. Ireland pleaded guilty to possessing 274 prohibited images of children and possessing an extreme pornographic image, while Sutton pleaded guilty to distributing a category A indecent photograph of a child, distributing three category B indecent photographs of a child, and possessing 64 prohibited images of children. On Monday, Ireland was sentenced to 30 years in prison and Sutton received a minimum 54-month sentence.
“I’ve gone through a whole gamut of emotions from anger to frustration as to why did nobody listen?” says Harding, who lives with Cathy in Guildford. “Because maybe if they had, there wouldn’t have been so many people harmed by this man and David Sutton.
“They [Surrey County Council] said they would investigate and report back, but it went silent. And after a while I stopped chasing, because I didn’t need to be reminded of what this man was.
“Last summer, when I heard about his arrest and what he’d done, it made me sick to my stomach to think what these poor kids had gone through. If we had been listened to, there was a very high chance it would not have happened.”
The Pride in Surrey case has sparked questions about what safeguarding concerns the local councils were aware of before the pair were arrested in April 2024. It wasn’t just local councils that had formal ties to Surrey Pride. Until earlier this year, Surrey Police listed the organisation on its website as a “partner agency” that “can also offer information, advice, and support” on LGBTQ issues, in addition to the force’s LGBTQ liaison officers.
Harding and Cathy are not the only people who tried to raise the alarm. The Telegraph has spoken to several Surrey residents who reported safeguarding concerns as long as six years ago with Surrey council, Guildford Borough Council and Woking Borough Council, which also had ties with Surrey Pride.
But no action appears to have been taken. Surrey County Council has, according to a Freedom of Information request, funded Pride in Surrey to the tune of more than £140,000 for various events and projects since 2020, including £24,275 for the year 2024-2025. Earlier this month, weeks after Ireland’s conviction, Guildford Borough Council announced that “Surrey Pride will be returning to Guildford” for a parade in September – the sixth annual Pride event in Surrey, and the second time it has taken place in Guildford. It included a hyperlink to the website of Pride in Surrey.
The decision astonished those who had been trying to raise the alarm.
“I contacted Guildford Borough Council after the news about him being arrested and about the level of charges, and they didn’t want to listen,” says Harding.
“I emailed Zöe Franklin [Lib Dem MP for Guildford] and Julia McShane [Lib Dem leader of the council] asking how they could let this event go ahead. Again, I got a very bland reply from Zöe that what was happening in court had nothing to do with the current Pride in Surrey...
Harding, who works as a driver for the disabled, claims the usual safeguarding role played by councils seemed to go “out of the window” with Pride in Surrey...
“Stephen had appointed himself as a safeguarding officer of Pride in Surrey, which didn’t sit right with us at all.
“I’ve worked with vulnerable adults and children much of my life, so I’m DBS checked and well trained in safeguarding, and knew that the founder of an organisation shouldn’t be in charge of safeguarding.
“He’d also set up a helpline called You Are Not Alone, for young LGBT people if they were struggling. It was a texting service. They could text in and if they wanted to talk to him, they could.
“He wouldn’t relinquish that phone to anyone. I offered numerous times to take it at the weekends to give him a break, as I knew some of the calls could be quite traumatic and that vulnerable children could be calling, but he wouldn’t.
“Other people – at least 10 – had expressed concerns about his behaviour,” says Harding, including an alleged “polyamorous” relationship which involved a young man.
Initially, Harding raised the issues with other Pride in Surrey staff, including its then chief operating officer, Lisa Finan-Cooke, who is now a Lib Dem councillor. Harding says her concerns were “pooh-poohed”.
“A few of us were talking about how we needed him removed from the organisation"...
“We were due to go to Pride in Godalming, and I’d already got tickets. But the night before, I received an email from Lisa Finan-Cooke saying that they’d cancelled my tickets and, due to my ‘discriminatory nature’, we were barred from attending, and that Surrey Police had been told.
“I also received a cease and desist letter saying that because I was ‘discriminatory’, I wasn’t to talk about Pride in Surrey on my socials.”...
“I’m a supporter of gay rights and had been to Pride before, and it was always a fun day out and very family friendly,” says the woman, a marketing manager and married mother-of-one.
“But that year, I’d seen images of people in leather ‘pup-play’ fetish gear, such as masks and dog collars, which particularly worried me as children as young as two or three were being encouraged to pet them. As a mother of a then three-year-old son, I didn’t want him exposed to that. I asked if this kind of ‘fetish’ was going to be allowed at Woking Pride...
Louise*, herself part of the LGBTQ community, who says she felt “an immediate sense of unease” when she stumbled upon a Pride in Surrey social media post in 2021, “celebrating” International Fetish Day.
“The image was striking,” she says. “It was Ireland holding a leash, with someone in a dog mask on all fours. As a bisexual woman I don’t feel that ‘fetish’ is part of my ‘community’, and my instinct told me that there was something deeply unsettling about this organisation.” On further investigation, the person in the mask appeared to be a 17-year-old girl, says Louise.
“I was stunned. Where was the safeguarding? Given that my workplace had previous sponsorship of Pride in Surrey’s annual event, I decided to voice my concerns, only to be swiftly shut down and accused of transphobia. It was one of the worst times of my life.”
Undeterred, Louise also wrote to other Pride in Surrey sponsors, including Surrey County Council and the district and borough councils, to express concern about their support for Pride in Surrey.
“Over four years, I must have written over a hundred emails in the hope that someone might look into the organisation and check the safeguarding,” she says. “It wasn’t just that one image. I noticed that they were visiting schools, and I worried that their message wouldn’t simply be that it’s OK to be gay or have two mummies, but might carry a more sinister message.
“Then they began a campaign to have Surrey’s Police & Crime Commissioner Lisa Townsend removed from office because they decided she was ‘transphobic’, after she said that male-bodied people were not women. Wholly inappropriate given she is a democratically-elected official.
“But the response was always the same. Most didn’t reply, or they said whilst they were taking my concerns seriously, they were committed to showing how inclusive and diverse they were.”
It is this commitment to “inclusiveness” that some say may have clouded the judgment of council and police officials over the activities of Ireland and Sutton within Pride in Surrey.
“Once again, we see paedophiles using the cover of the ‘LGBTQIA+ community’ to conceal their evil acts,” says Kate Harris of the charity LGB Alliance. “Several people tried to alert those in leadership positions, and they were ignored – as far back as 2019. It is in the public interest for the facts to come out. Young lesbians and gays should expect to be protected from predators – safeguarding is the responsibility of every single one of us. In this appalling case, young people were badly let down.”"
Left wingers love to mock those who are concerned about children as
bigots who are complaining in bad faith, so it's no wonder the council
didn't listen
"His influence over the force was so pronounced that in 2021, when Surrey’s Police and Crime Commissioner Lisa Townsend called for single-sex domestic abuse and rape crisis services, Ireland posted a photo of one of his officer chums sitting in the rainbow police vehicle holding up a sign that read: “TERFy Townsend not fit for office.” After Townsend raised the incident in the media, Chief Constable Gavin Stephens urged her to apologise to Ireland, informing her that he was “a friend of Surrey police”.
There were other warning signs. “It was very clear this wasn’t a Pride that was inclusive for lesbians,” recalls Maria Esposito, who attended initial planning meetings. “There was an obsessive focus on queer and trans stuff. Stephen portrayed himself as a fierce LGBTQ+ all-inclusive advocate and a self-anointed figurehead. We never went back.”
Ireland also swiftly appointed himself as Safeguarding Lead. Yet at the same time, PiS volunteers started to notice that he surrounded himself with young people who called him “daddy”. And it was becoming clear that a significant portion of his community outreach was directed at children. “If you look at PiS’s social media activity in 2019 and 2020, so much is focused on enticing children to take part,” one local lesbian says. “Stephen Ireland clearly set up PiS to get access to children.”
When volunteers voiced their disapproval, Ireland rebuffed all concerns, claiming he was in a “polyamorous relationship” — something that is legitimised and glamorised under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. And here is a problem with the expansion of the LGBTQ+ activism platform: some of the movement’s current agenda acts as a useful cover-up for nastier elements with depraved intentions...
Glaring red flags like this are now far harder to confront. Pride has evolved away from its original purpose — seeking tolerance, acceptance and equality — and a new, hyper-permissive culture has taken root, which is normalising predatory behaviour. Unfortunately, the new openness for fetish, sexualised public displays, and Pride’s celebration of “transing” children has provided a convenient smokescreen for abusive men like Ireland...
Eventually, Harding made her misgivings known at a special meeting called to discuss the issues at which other volunteers were present. “I told him, ‘Every bloody thing is about kinks and pups and fuck knows what. What you’re in is a threesome’,” she says. “He didn’t like that and shouted that I needed to educate myself, that I was being discriminatory.”
“I asked him, ‘If polyamory falls under LGBTQ+, what’s next? Paedophiles and rapists?’ That’s when he lost it. He was jumping up and down, jabbing his finger at me — spitting in my face.” Harding resigned on the spot.
Shortly afterwards, Harding received a “cease and desist” letter. That letter was, incidentally, co-signed by Kel Finan-Cooke, who, along with her wife Lisa Finan-Cooke, was a volunteer and subsequently a director of PiS until both resigned, on the same day, in June 2023. Both women are Liberal Democrat councillors for Surrey Heath. The Finan-Cookes, both of whom I have spoken to, insist that Harding’s concerns were taken seriously, “but it seemed to just be about Stephen having a younger boyfriend, and because he was 18 it was perfectly legal”...
Following the sentencing of Ireland and Sutton, I visited the PiS Hub on Egham High Street, which was staffed by Powell. In the Hub, leaflets on trans and non-binary rights predominate. I could not see anything specifically focusing on gay men or lesbians — but collars, leads, ears, tails, and paw-themed items were available to buy.
Every whistleblower I spoke to, most of whom requested anonymity, expressed the belief that PiS should be disbanded entirely. “He built this organisation,” one Surrey resident says, “and it’s in his image. Stephen Ireland put his stamp on everything and demanded loyalty, not accountability, encouraging a culture of silence.”
Regardless of all these concerns, and the sentencing of Ireland, several statutory bodies working with vulnerable children have maintained ties with PiS...
And what about Pride on a national level? Not many years ago, it was indomitable. Institutions used to cheer it every step of the way. But cracks are appearing here too. A recent High Court ruling found that the Northumbria Police breached impartiality by allowing officers to march in uniform at Newcastle Pride 2024. And Police Scotland barred their officers from attending Pride events while in uniform. The era of tacit state approval of all things Pride is waning.
Sponsors, too, have started distancing themselves from the movement. This year, three quarters of event organisers have reported a decrease in corporate partnerships. A quarter have seen as much as a 50% drop, according to the UK Pride Organisers Network. But the money aside, many lesbians and gay men are also increasingly speaking out about how Pride no longer represents them.
Certainly, the Ireland case should make the whole organisation ask itself some searching questions about who it stands for. What happened to safeguarding the vulnerable and scrutinising the powerful? Why were whistleblowers ignored? Where is the public apology, the expression of concern, and the clear commitment to learning from these failures? But most important of all: how is it that an organisation once rooted in justice and dignity was so easily co-opted as a cover for predatory behaviour?"
Related:
Feminist campaigner ‘kicked out of Pride for asking safeguarding questions’
"A leading feminist campaigner has claimed she was kicked out of a Pride event after asking about safeguarding.
Julie Bindel, a gender-critical campaigner and journalist, said four members of security staff told her to leave Pride in Surrey after she interviewed attendees for a podcast...
Ms Bindel and her colleague claimed the intervention of the security personnel was prompted by a complaint by Ms Franklin. The campaigner told The Telegraph that their removal amounted to an attack on free speech.
She said: “The era of ‘no debate’ continues, at least in Surrey."
