AN exasperated Nicola Sturgeon told Ruth Davidson to come clean over her own party’s links to Cambridge Analytica.
The Tory leader had accused the SNP of hypocrisy during yesterday’s First Minister’s Questions.
Davidson said that while SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford had demanded details of meetings and links between the Tories and Cambridge Analytica, he had not confessed that his own party had met with the “disgraced data-harvesting company”. Sturgeon said a consultant hired by the SNP had met the firm in February 2016, ahead of the Scottish Parliament election, but no work had gone ahead, as they were a “bunch of cowboys”.
“The SNP has never worked with Cambridge Analytica. We have never hired the company or paid it any money to do any work for us, which is surely the fundamental point,” she said.
The First Minister went on to point out that the Tories had many links with the firm, and its parent company, SCL. “For example, a former chairman of Oxford West and Abingdon Conservative Association used to run SCL, and there are reports that he is now the chief executive officer of Cambridge Analytica,” the SNP leader said.
There were also, Sturgeon added, reports SCL’s founding chairman was a former Tory MP, and that a director of the company had donated more than £700,000 to the Conservative Party, while the UK Government had contracts worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
“I can say two things categorically: the SNP has never worked with Cambridge Analytica, and the Scottish Government has never worked with Cambridge Analytica. I am not sure whether the Conservative Party or the UK Government can say the same,” Sturgeon said.
A faltering Davidson attempted to draw distance between the Scottish Tories and the UK Tories: “If the First Minister had bothered to listen to my first question, she would know that the party that I am in charge of has never held any meetings or had any contact with Cambridge Analytica.”
The Tory leader than attacked Sturgeon for not being fully open.
“Transparency SNP-style is to fling out allegations at opponents, fail to set out your own record, deny that you know anything about it and, when you are caught out, give half-answers to legitimate questions,” she said.
But the First Minister replied to say Davidson’s record on transparency was pretty ropey, pointing to the secretive £425,000 donation from a Scottish Tory to the DUP.
She added: “Another company that is reported to have very close links with Cambridge Analytica is Aggregate IQ.
“We should remember that it was the Constitutional Research Council, a group run by a former vice-chairman of the Scottish Conservative Party, that gave a donation to the Democratic Unionist Party’s Brexit campaign. We still do not know the source of that donation, but we know that some of it was spent on Aggregate IQ."
Davidson should be transparent and disclose the source of the donation, Sturgeon said.
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