It’s natural when someone slags off the place you come from to get a bit defensive, so when the Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said this week that Aberdeen is a shell of what it used to be, my first reaction was to get a wee bit prickly; what would she know flying up from London with her fancy opinions? She also said Aberdeen was dying which sounded like by-election exaggeration to me. Facing a few problems, yes. In need of some help, yes. But “dying”?

Then I thought about what I’ve actually seen in Aberdeen on my recent visits, which certainly couldn’t be used in the case for the defence. Union Street, the once-grand granite thoroughfare, is now a scrappy, empty, depressing road from nowhere to nowhere – dragged down, no question, by trends that have affected other places, but made worse, no doubt, by the decisions of the council. Its main offence has been making the city centre so unwelcoming to people with cars that people with cars stopped coming. But the plans for another new shopping centre down the road is also about to make things worse by drawing people away rather than pulling them towards Union Street. A miserable walk down the street and suddenly Ms Badenoch’s use of the d-word doesn’t seem so histrionic: Aberdeen’s main artery has been drained of life.

Another reliable sign is the house prices. Prices in Glasgow, Edinburgh and elsewhere have continued to rise but the picture in Aberdeen is bad and getting worse. The most recent figures from the property firm DJ Alexander, out this month, show Aberdeen recording the biggest drop in prices anywhere in Scotland: £7,517 in the past year, a sharp contrast with the average price across Scotland, which rose by 1.9%. It means the average house price in Aberdeen is now........

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