‘We’ve all accepted that the North Sea is declining,” says Roy, 70, a taxi driver working in Aberdeen for the past 20 years. “Over the years there have been a few huge market crashes but we always recover. This time, it’s a real decline.”
Drive along the granite city’s Union Street and there are dozens of shuttered shops, some empty for almost a decade following one of the longest routs in the history of the oil market, which brought oil prices to lows of less than $30 (£23) a barrel in 2016, less than half its value today.
