Last week's Guardian reported unionists spending heavily online in a bid to deny SNP a majority. NOW the full scale can be seen: third-party campaigns- with no clear details of their funding- spent £tens of thousands of pounds on digital ads pushing tactical voting.

A group called ‘Young Unionists’ spent over £20,000 on Facebook ads, £5,000 in final days of campaign. Tens of thousands of voters were pushed to VoteUnion tactical voting tool, that is supposed to carry details of who paid for them, but Young Unionists’ ads had no name attached!

Young Unionists did register as a non-party campaigner in Scottish election, secretary listed as Maximillian Young – involved in campaign called Capitalist Worker, which spent £65,000 on anti-Jeremy Corbyn ads in the 2019 GE-without, as I revealed recently, declaring ANY DONORS!

Another illegally anonymous Facebook page, ‘Vote Union’, last week spent £3,012 promoting its tactical vote calculator “to stop an SNP majority”. Again the ads carried no details of who paid for them!!

MORE!! Another anonymous pro-Trump student group ‘Turning Point UK’ spent £3,700 on Facebook ads last week, all focused on Scottish election. Tuesday-Thursday, at least 70,000 voters saw a Turning Point ad that said :
“Vote Conservative, Labour or Liberal to remake Scotland!”.

Another ILLEGAL website Think Scotland, run by fmr Brexit Party MEP Brian Monteith -also behind Capitalist Worker – bought more Facebook ads in final week of campaigning than the SNP! It does NOT reveal sources of its funding, spent £12,600 on Facebook ads in week to 6 May.

Think Scotland’s spending included £3,000 on ads pushing Vote Union’s tactical voting tool, ads all bought in Monteith’s name. Although he previously said all protocols have been followed in respect of election donations, THEY were NOT, as no source of the cash was provided.

Yet ANOTHER illegal campaign, Businesses for the Union, spent more than £10,000 during Scottish elections. Facebook data shows ads paid for by Matthew Kilcoyne, deputy director of Adam Smith Institute – an influential free-market think tank that DOES NOT DECLARE its donors.

NOTE: Under new election legislation, digital adverts in Scotland MUST carry details of who paid for them. Yet all these unionist third party campaigns were NOT shut down by @ElectoralCommissionUK