Why The Russian Collusion Story Is So Important: Carole Cadwalladr

13 June 2018, 13:01

The journalist who uncovered the Cambridge Analytica and Russian collusion scandals told James O'Brien why the stories are so important for the UK.

Carole Cadwalladr of the Observer says the way that tech companies show secretive political adverts is anti-democratic.

She told James O'Brien: "I'd just been at this conference in San Francisco, called TechCrunch Disrupt. Everyone was disrupting something, like the media industry has been disrupted and the music industry has been disrupted.

"And I realised technology is disrupting politics.

"If you disrupt politics, you disrupt democracy. That's what's happened.

"It's happening in darkness. The whole thing is being mediated by the tech giants. These adverts are going through the servers of Google and Facebook and we have no idea what goes on inside them. They are absolutely unaccountable by law."

Carole stated that the electoral laws in the UK dated back to the 19th century, when people used money and beer to get votes and that technology has now moved beyond them.

"In America, they don't bother controlling money in their elections, they've lost that battle," she revealed. "But we do. This is the way we keep people straight. It's absolutely the bedrock of everything.

"There is absolutely no way now of controlling money that goes into our elections."