Meet the Global Campaigns Manager who thinks campaigning is invalid
The reactions to my campaign against GB News – and the subsequent Ofcom investigations – is a useful insight into how Caroline Farrow and her peers machinate
For the past seven weeks, I have been campaigning against multiple instances of blatant homophobia aired on GB News. That campaign has resulted in Ofcom opening two investigations into the channel: one for Syntyche Djunga’s comments on The Saturday Five, and one for Caroline Farrow’s claims made during an episode of Alex Armstrong Tonight.
I have written and spoken extensively about these broadcasts, the inflammatory content within them, and about my campaign at large. This is about the subsequent reaction to those investigations being launched earlier this week, because it has been just as revealing as the original comments.
It’s worth restating the material plainly, because there now seems to be a great deal of energy being spent on making it vague.
On 5th July 2026, whilst discussing Pride events on Alex Armstrong Tonight, Catholic activist and commentator Caroline Farrow said Pride was “not about gay rights” but was instead about:
“celebrating every single sexuality that isn’t sexuality, including some very bizarre and unhealthy kinks and quirks, you know, like furries and bestiality and even minor-attracted… they call themselves ‘minor-attracted people’ – you know, paedophiles.”
Two weeks earlier, during a discussion about Preston Davey on the panel show The Saturday Five, Syntyche Djunga – who goes by ‘Based and Bougie’ – made the claim that “gay men and gay couples are statistically more prone to… child sexual assault with their adopted children.” When asked to provide evidence, she said she didn’t have it to hand but that she’d “seen it, and it’s been proven time and time again that gay men are more prone to more sexual deviancy.”
That is the exact material we are dealing with. It is worth stating what the actual evidence says, since Djunga could not: the largest and most frequently cited study on the question reviewed sexual abuse cases at a Denver children’s hospital and identified a gay or lesbian perpetrator in fewer than 1% of the cases where the offender could be identified – two out of 269, a rate lower than the gay and lesbian share of the population. Its authors concluded that the children studied were unlikely to have been abused by identifiably gay or lesbian people. Broader reviews put the proportion of child sexual abuse committed by heterosexual men at over 80%.
The oldest lie in the book was aired twice in three weeks on a licensed news channel, and on the second occasion it was delivered by a professional campaigner who does this for a living. The Broadcasting Code requires licensees to justify offensive material by context. That is what is being examined here, and it’s worth being precise about it, because much of the noise this week has depended on purposely downplaying what was said.
The first thing I’d like to address underpins almost every other grievance Caroline Farrow has aired this week. She has characterised this campaign as Ofcom “investigating my opinion.” It simply is not. Ofcom doesn’t regulate members of the public, commentators or guests – it regulates broadcasters who hold a licence and have accepted the conditions attached to it. Farrow knows as much, as she was recently bragging about how she’s exempt from any consequences enforced by the regulator.
She faces no sanction or penalty. She is very much free to hold and express her opinions, and she has been doing so at considerable length all week, entirely unimpeded. What is being examined is whether a regulated broadcaster met the obligations it voluntarily signed up to, and the conflation of the two is what converts a routine compliance process into a free speech martyrdom.
Since the investigations opened, one of Farrow’s central arguments has been that the complaints against her comments don’t count. She has pointed to the large number of complainants – a new record in terms of GB News broadcasts – and characterised it as “mobilised” rather than spontaneous, as though campaigning is an invalid form of activism.
I find this stance particularly interesting, given that Caroline Farrow’s job title is Global Campaigns Manager for CitizenGO. For those who aren’t aware, CitizenGO is a Spain-based ultra-conservative lobbyist group whose entire operating model is mass mobilisation through the use of petitions, template emails, coordinated complaints and plenty more. Its campaigns have targeted, among others, Cadbury’s for an advert featuring two men kissing.
She is, by profession, a person who converts other people’s diffuse discomfort into a countable number and presents that number to institutions as evidence of public feeling. During her tirade against the campaign against her, Farrow cited her own CitizenGO petition addressed to Ofcom, targeting the BBC for its coverage on transgender people, as apparent evidence that the regulator applies its standards unevenly. I can therefore reliably conclude that mobilised complaints are only legitimate when they serve Caroline Farrow’s interests.
But there is a more fundamental problem with the argument, which is that complaint volumes do not determine outcomes, as evidenced by this very campaign. Thousands of people also complained about Sharron Davies’ comments on Patrick Christys Tonight on 9th July, yet Ofcom has decided not to take those complaints forward. They form part of the exact same campaign but saw a different outcome, because Ofcom assesses the content against the Code instead of acting on a number.
Farrow’s issue is that the number embarrasses her, which unfortunately doesn’t make it invalid by default. If more than 12,000 people hear what you say and conclude that a national broadcaster let a guest link the LGBTQ+ community to paedophiles, that is more than 12,000 people who agree with me.
Something else I find fascinating is that in the weeks since her segment aired, Farrow has addressed everyone from Ofcom to Zack Polanski to the Good Law Project. She has liaised with the Free Speech Union and written to both GB News and Alex Armstrong multiple times. She has not, at any point, addressed the person who started this.
The press coverage has largely followed the same pattern, though for different reasons. The Good Law Project filed a complaint and quite rightly publicised it, but the coverage has tended to place them at the origin of a campaign that was already several weeks and several thousand complaints old by the time they arrived. I did not speak with anyone from Good Law Project until after the investigations were announced. In the case of the newsroom, I suspect this is simply the gravitational pull of the source – organisations have press officers, whereas individuals like myself do not.
Caroline Farrow’s approach is a different matter entirely. Consider what each available villain does for the overall story: the Good Law Project is a well-funded legal campaign organisation, which is ideal for “lawfare” and “elite capture” framing. Zack Polanski is a left-wing politician – perfect for “the political establishment silencing dissent.” Bimini, who has been instrumental to this campaign and has led the charge alongside me, is a drag queen speaking out against a channel whose audience already believes drag queens are the problem.
The actual complainant and originator, however, is a regular citizen who watched a news channel tell Britain that people like him are a danger to children, and took objection to it. I have no affiliation to any lobbyist group or political party, and there’s no story or useful conspiracy in that. I am an ordinary gay man objecting to a very old libel, and everything Caroline Farrow and her peers have reached for collapses the moment you take that into account. I’m not precious about credit, but I don’t think the omission is accidental. I’m not being named because the defence requires my absence.
After Ofcom announced their investigations, a caveat appeared: not everyone at Pride is a paedophile. That caveat did not arrive with Farrow’s initial claim. It’s also a jarring stance to take a month later, when her description of Pride events in separate posts has escalated. They have been labelled “kinky sex parades” that are “organised by paedophiles.” I believe it’s worth highlighting this, because it marks the difference between someone who misspoke, and someone with clear intent.
On 11th August 2026, GB News issued a statement describing the investigations as part of an “orchestrated campaign” against the channel, restating that it complies fully with the Broadcasting Code, noting that it has been Britain’s “number one news channel” for twelve months, and promising to defend itself “robustly”.
This statement, which marks only the second time GB News has addressed the complaints in seven weeks, still fails to engage with what was actually said. Two guests directly and baselessly linked gay people to paedophilia, and their response is to boast about viewing figures and promise a fight.
It’s a marked contrast to the stance they took last year, when presenter Josh Howie was found to have breached the Broadcasting Code when claiming the LGBTQ+ community “includes paedos”. In writing to the regulator, GB News recognised that “the conflation or association of homosexuality with paedophilia is a harmful and homophobic trope.”
That isn’t my characterisation of Howie’s claim, nor is it the framing of anyone else campaigning today. That is GB News, in writing, to Ofcom. The channel has already conceded the principle at the heart of both current investigations – it knows this trope is harmful and homophobic, because it told the regulator as much. It still aired said trope twice more within three weeks, and is now describing the objection to it as an orchestrated campaign.
I’m not putting much faith into this statement, because their first one was full of falsehoods. Their initial defence of Farrow’s comments was that they were “robustly and repeatedly challenged.” Viewers can assess that for themselves. Alex Armstrong’s pushback, in full, was that the overwhelming people at Pride were there for good reasons, that he didn’t think it was “full of paedophiles”, but that he’s “sure there are nefarious people.” That is the robust and repeated challenge.
These responses have ranged from embarrassing to enraging, but the most perplexing of all came from the LGB Alliance. Their chief executive, Kate Barker-Mawjee, publicly backed GB News as “championing the rights of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals”, characterising the Farrow segment as calling out the homophobia of the “straight TQ+ movement.” The charity’s co-founder, Malcolm Clark, also posted in support.
I have deliberately refrained from mentioning transgender people throughout this campaign – not to exclude them, but to protect them. I knew that a worryingly large demographic would use this as a wedge issue to demonise the trans community further, despite the comments in question focusing squarely on gay people. Lo and behold, the organisation that purportedly exists to defend lesbian, gay and bisexual people has decided that Farrow’s comments were actually anti-homophobia, and that the objection to it is a trans issue.
The mechanism by which these people operate is on full, unabashed display. Homophobic content airs and plenty of gay people object to it, but that objection is suddenly reclassified as straight and transgender activism. Because it is now a “straight TQ+” issue, the homophobia in question dissipates entirely, and a charity that nominally represents gay men ends up defending a broadcaster that platformed the paedophile trope against a gay men who complained about it.
There is one further detail worth putting on the record, as an example of the organisation’s own conduct. In December 2022, openDemocracy revealed that the LGB Alliance was renting office space at 55 Tufton Street, the Westminster address that plays host to a cluster of Britain’s right-wing think tanks. It confirmed the Tufton Street office, said it had chosen the address because it was “handy” and “flexible”, and warned against drawing “conspiratorial conclusions.”
I’m going to graciously take them at their word on that, because precision is the entire point. I don’t know who funds the LGB Alliance. Nobody outside it does, because it doesn’t disclose its donors, and I’m not going to speculate about it. What matters is how the address came to light. It surfaced in a Freedom of Information request to Ofcom – because the LGB Alliance had written to Ofcom, and the regulator wrote back to them there.
So, an organisation that has itself lobbied Ofcom over content it objected to now regards it as illegitimate that I did exactly the same thing. When the LGB Alliance complains to Ofcom, that is advocacy on behalf of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. When thousands of gay men and their allies write to Ofcom about a broadcast calling them paedophiles, it becomes the “straight TQ+ movement” mounting an orchestrated campaign.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, I have been running this campaign for seven weeks. The segments at its core are about Pride, gay men and paedophilia. My campaign has specifically been about calling out homophobia. To have that bastardised and recategorised as the work of a “straight TQ+ movement” is, to me, the work of a group so committed to a single fight that it will provide cover for the exact bigotry it claims to oppose, provided that bigotry comes from the right direction.
I have asked Barker-Mawjee and the LGB Alliance to answer for their position directly. I do not expect a reply. The letter exists so that the question is on the record – and so that the Charity Commission has a copy, too.
What has happened this week is a very common machination and once you recognise it, you’ll see it everywhere. Someone will make an outrageous, offensive claim, whether it be on television or radio or social media, and then spend days – if not weeks – retrospectively trying to apply nuances and caveats to their plain bigotry. If they’re unable to defend their words, they’ll instead turn their attention to attacking their opponents and questioning their motives.
In turn, that person will pick the most convenient enemy available – a common enemy amongst them and their peers, if you will – and answer that enemy rather than the actual complaint. They might try playing a game of guilt by association, noting that a critic once said something scathing about one of their peers and presenting this as damning bias, without ever applying the same test to their own coalition or the people amplifying them.
When the offensive words pertain to gay people, that person will try their hardest to make it about transgender people, regardless of what was said, before wrapping it all in the guise of “free speech”. They will frame any opposition to their claims as persecution over their private opinions, which it isn’t.
None of this is unique to Caroline Farrow, and I don’t credit her with writing the playbook. It is, however, the standard operating procedure of a well-resourced international campaign sector that has spent a decade learning how to distort arguments to their favour, often with enough money and influence to succeed.
To reiterate: two investigations are now open, GB News says it will “robustly defend” itself, and Ofcom will take as long as it takes to make a decision – I’ve spoken previously about my lack of confidence in the pace.
That said, something has already been established that no amount of retrospective caveating can undo. In July 2026, a national news channel broadcast the claim that Pride celebrates paedophilia. Two weeks prior, that same channel aired the baseless suggestion that gay men are sexually abusing their adopted children at higher rates. Both programmes are now the subject of formal Standards investigations, and the record of what was said exists independently of the arguments being made in defence of them now.
Everything since has been a transparent attempt to shift the discussion, and I refuse to let it happen. I began a campaign against homophobia, and I am still campaigning against homophobia. The response to that campaign has perhaps been the most telling thing of all.