Skip to main content
Work with the NEU
A tale of two cities: after fishing, after oil, what’s left for Aberdeen?
Rich natural resources built Aberdeen twice, but today it lies almost abandoned, as our city faces a third major transition — and the renewable energy future threatens same old exploitation, warns LARA FLANNERY
A general view of Aberdeen Harbour in Scotland, which has been identified in a study as the most affordable city for single people looking to buy a home in Britain, February 12, 2025

THERE are two Aberdeens. The first is that which breaks out into the wider British news with some frequency, the self-professed “oil capital of Europe,” the “silver city with the golden sands,” a strange international enclave of students and oil technicians, tucked away in a far corner of Scotland.

The other Aberdeen appears as any one of hundreds of similar towns and cities failed by the bourgeois state. It is an Aberdeen of crumbling tenements and neglected streets, of unemployment and unemployability, a city that has never felt like one with a future, even years before that of the oil industry was called into doubt.

Despite talk of Just Transitions and “no ban without a plan,” we must still work to build a better future both for Aberdeen, and for all Aberdonians.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
The oil platform Stena Spey is moved with tugboats amongst other rigs that have been left in the Cromarty Firth near Invergordon in the Highlands of Scotland
Scotland / 24 October 2025
24 October 2025
FOR THE CROWN NOT THE PEOPLE: Gwynt y Mor II, Wales' largest
Features / 22 March 2025
22 March 2025
LUKE FLETCHER fleshes out Plaid Cymru's plan for the revitalisation of Wales's economy