Tories demand Yes Scotland apology over hacking claims

It has emerged that an investigation had found no criminality linked to official Yes Scotland e-mail accounts. Picture: PA

Deputy Tory leader Jackson Carlaw said the Yes campaign should say sorry to the police after it emerged that an investigation had found no criminality linked to official Yes Scotland e-mail accounts.

Carlaw’s intervention triggered a furious response from Yes Scotland, which pointed out that police are still making inquiries into the illegal hacking of a personal e-mail account of a senior member of the Yes Scotland team.

The row erupted over a police investigation which began in August when the Yes Scotland leader Blair Jenkins described the alleged hacking as a serious assault on democracy. The hacking allegations coincided with revelations that constitutional expert Dr Elliot Bulmer had been paid by Yes Scotland for an article supporting a written constitution for an independent Scotland, which appeared in a Glasgow-based newspaper.

Yesterday it emerged that Police Scotland had concluded that no criminality linked to a Yes Scotland e-mail account had been established.

Inquiries are continuing into the unauthorised access to a private e-mail account, where communications with Yes Scotland were “illegally accessed”.

Carlaw said: “Given the tantrums from the Yes campaign at the time over this, they really owe police an apology.”

A Yes Scotland spokesman claimed that the response of pro-Union politicians to the hacking investigation was a “deliberate and cynical attempt to deflect attention from their own embarrassment” over revelations that the Better Together campaign has been reprimanded for sending 300,000 unsolicited texts to voters.