ACTOR Brian Cox had to move to defend his Scottish credentials and the right to speak out about independence after he was challenged by a BBC news interviewer.

The 70-year-old, who is one of the most high-profile independence supporters and launched the Yes Scotland campaign alongside former First Minister Alex Salmond in 2012, is used to parrying questions from Unionists.

In an interview from his US home with Simon McCoy on BBC News 24 in the wake of the announcement of plans for a second independence vote he was told he had taken "quite a lot of stick for living in New York" during the last campaign.

The Bourne Identity and Long Kiss Goodnight actor had claimed the refusal of Westminster to negotiate with Holyrood over Brexit prompted the second referendum call and he spoke of his views on the future relationship between European universities.

McCoy said: "The difficulty with this is here are you almost second guessing what the relationship will be between Europe’s universities because this is something that obviously will be negotiated in the next two years.

“You know better than anyone how divisive all this is because you got quite a lot of stick for living in New York, not living in Scotland and not being able to vote and yet being part of the campaign for independence.”

Cox responded: "I was also rector of Dundee University during that whole period which made me very connected to Scotland. I spend a lot of my in Scotland although I don’t live there. I would say I spend a third of my time in Scotland, so that’s not true."

Cox had said: "What annoys me is that some people do not simply understand what is going on in Scotland.

"Scotland has a tremendous relationship with European universities.

"There’s that whole section in education that probably do not like what has happened."

At another stage of the interview Cox said: "Quite frankly I think she [Theresa May] has systematically ignored any kind of proper negotiations that could have been had with Scotland on this very subject."

McCoy chipped in: "The difficulty of course is that Brexit is happening, there are many people who don’t like it but now have to accept it and Theresa May’s argument is let’s get that sorted before we then consider a Scottish independence vote because without the facts of Brexit nobody will really know what they are voting for."

The interviewer added: "The SNP’s raison d’etre is independence, is there a sense actually she was running out of time and this was the last moment she could have called a second referendum at a time when the UK, let’s face it, has got some very important decisions to make, a lot of people will be concentrating on the Brexit negotiations and won’t have the time perhaps to deal with a Scottish referendum, that perhaps the best thing is to wait for the Brexit result and then tackle this issue?”

Cox responded: “I think that is a fair point. While I’m not privy to the negotiations that have been going on, I can imagine the systematic ignoring of the pleas of the Scottish Government that have probably hastened this whole decision.”

A BBC spokeswoman said: “Viewers of the BBC News Channel expect our presenters to ask robust, challenging and relevant questions.

"Brian Cox was more than able to respond to the impartial line of questioning from Simon.”