As a student, I spent several summer holidays working with youngsters in community projects in the Torry area of Aberdeen. One of the youthful regulars was Barney Crockett, later to become the city’s Lord Provost.

Torry lies south of the River Dee and Aberdeen harbour. Until the opening of the Victoria Bridge in 1881, Torry folk didn’t really consider themselves part of Aberdeen. Many worked in the then thriving fishing and ship building industries. It mirrored the historic Fittie community, lying on the other side of the harbour.

My mother’s family lived in Old Torry; until North Sea oil came along that is. From the mid-1970s the area was systematically razed to make way for storage tanks and oil service facilities. It may not have been ethnic cleansing, but it was most certainly economic and social cleansing. Thankfully, Fittie narrowly escaped a similar fate at the hands of rapacious oil. By that time, large scale housing development had hugely increased Torry’s population and fundamentally changed its character. It is now home to some of Scotland’s most deprived communities.

The ravaging of Torry has not stopped. It is the site of the £150million Ness Energy from Waste incinerator. It will burn non-recyclable waste from the more affluent areas of Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire and Moray, transported by fleets of environmentally unfriendly lorries. This, in an area where many already experience breathing problems. Life expectancy is around 13 years less than in better-off parts of the city.

The sweetener for local people is the jam tomorrow promise of cheaper heating for their homes. As campaigners point out, phase one covers only 300 of the area’s 5,500 households. How many locals will die before the scheme is fully rolled out, if it ever is? Torry has also endured disruption, noise and pollution arising from ongoing construction of Aberdeen’s south harbour. Allegedly, the new deep-water facility will service an armada of cruise ships, bringing world travellers to breathe the polluted air and marvel at the wonder of the adjacent incinerator.

Understandably, there are concerns as to how passengers will be whisked from ship to Balmoral or the whisky trail, without being exposed to the sight of local deprivation. Will a new road cut a sanitised swathe through Torry, leading to even more displacement?

Unfortunately, more misery lies ahead for Torry folk. The Scottish Government’s Planning and Environmental Appeals Division recently approved change of use for their much-loved St Fittick’s Park and Doonie’s Rare Breeds Farm. Instead, it will accommodate the proposed Energy Transition Zone (ETZ), a business park aiming to develop the renewable and low carbon energy sector.

Few would deny Aberdeen must plan its post - oil future, but surely Torry folk have suffered enough, without losing this prized open space and its diverse wild life. Supporters of ETZ Ltd, including its ubiquitous chairman, Sir Ian Wood, stress the economic benefits, such as 10,000 new jobs. My cynical eyes glaze over on hearing that sort of tripe, sorry hype. We still await the thousands of promised jobs that would surely flow from Donald Trump’s Aberdeenshire golf course. In rejecting appeals against rezoning, the Scottish Government reporter concluded in fluent jargonese that, “wider environmental and economic benefits outweigh the disbenefits.” Eh?

In my experience, the people of Torry are honest, hardworking folk who would be well disposed to sharing those economic and environmental benefits with Sir Ian and his well-heeled neighbours in Aberdeen’s leafiest suburb. As a bonus, they can also have the waste incinerator. The whole thing stinks. As one activist put it, the planning system “works for the interests of large oil and gas greenwashing, rather than ordinary people.”

Understandably, they have little faith in proposed measures to preserve the park’s wetlands and the water quality in the East Tullos burn. Local and national politicians need look no further to see why many of us have lost faith in democracy and politics generally. The odds are stacked in favour of the rich and influential and against little people. The people of Torry battle on against something that will permanently undermine the quality of their lives and the lives of their children. The Friends of St Fittick’s Park have called on “allies across Scotland and the world” to fight future planning decisions. They deserve our full-hearted support and, after all, David slew Goliath.

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