First Minister of Scotland on Radio Tay 'Talk in'

I've just listened to Alex Salmond being questioned on Radio Tay's Sunday morning phone in show 'Tay Talk in'. Although I notice it's now a Scotland wide show called 'Scotland's Talk in'.

I stopped listening to the show a while back as the usual host Ally Bally usually had me bristling whenever he undermined the First Minister. Delighting whenever a caller phoned in to castigate the First Minister with nonsense stories that had appeared in the biased media that week.

But I heard that Alex would meet Ally and was interested to see how they got on. As it turned out they seemed friendly enough together. The calls were mainly positive about independence and any questions were easily handled by Alex Salmond.

I thought that things would turn nasty when Ally asked Alex to stay a bit longer than planned as he had some more callers lined up. As it turned out the new callers were positive about independence as well.

Alex did a good job of explaining that after a successful vote for 'Yes' in the independence referendum it would be up to the people of Scotland to vote for whatever political party they wanted to run Scotland. The 'Tay Talk in' was always keen to polarise the options between the status quo and an Alex Salmond run Scotland. Similar to the rest of the media in Scotland.

Alex had to correct Ally when he claimed that Dennis Canavan supported the 'No' camp. The fact that Dennis was a former Labour MP means he's automatically put in the 'No' camp by the media. I doubt if Ally is aware that Dennis is part of the 'Yes Scotland' team and that there's a 'Labour for Independence' group as well.

The best call was about the biased BBC and it's campaign against an independent Scotland and what the First Minister would do about it.

It was a pretty weak response from the First Minister. He explained that the BBC was controlled from London and therefore most of their stories were English centric. Irrelevant stories about English health, education etc being called 'national news'. Oh and BBC Radio Scotland were just bad because they used the anti independence 'Daily Mail' and 'Daily Telegraph' etc for their morning story headlines so were just repeating what they heard from down south.

There wasn't a peep about the sacking of impartial reporters to be replaced by ten student 'trainees' or the introduction of James Naughtie from Radio 4 to Radio Scotland in order to strengthen the Unionist agenda.

Day after day and night after night the BBC hammer away at the SNP yet it doesn't seem to bother the First Minister too much.

Hopefully he has some agenda that he isn't letting us in on because it looks pretty bleak from here with calls for international monitors to be called in urgently to control the biased BBC in the run up to next years independence referendum.