NEXT week’s local election, perhaps more so than any other in recent years, has been dominated by events that no town hall has control over.

When Theresa May announced the snap General Election just last week, the race for control of Scotland’s 32 local authorities became even less about local issues and more about independence, Brexit, and the big visions of Nicola Sturgeon, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May.

That is no fault of the local politicians and the foot soldiers pushing leaflets through letter boxes and knocking on voters’ doors in a bid to increase 2012’s pathetic 39 per cent turnout.

That’s just politics, which Aberdeenshire has a complex relationship with. It’s the fourth-largest council area in Scotland, taking in Stonehaven, Peterhead and Fraserburgh, along to Banff and Portsoy.

It’s also home to a controversial golf course built by a man who, as you may have heard, recently became the President of The United States of America.

Golf and tourism, along with farming, fishing and oil are all key industries here.

Politically, all but one of the five Holyrood seats that cover Aberdeenshire are SNP. All three of the Westminster seats are SNP.

But this is an area that overwhelmingly voted No in the 2014 independence referendum.

Last year, 55 per cent of voters backed Remain in the EU referendum, though, according to the BBC, a cluster of six wards in the Banff and Buchan area in north Aberdeenshire had a strong Leave majority of 61 per cent.

Much of this is down to local discontent within the fishing industry about the EU’s common fisheries policy.

Buzzfeed recently put Eilidh Whiteford’s Banff and Buchan seat, home to Peterhead – Europe’s largest white fishing port – on their list of The 14 Seats The SNP Could Lose In The General Election. It would be some portent for the SNP if they lost Banff and Buchan – this has been a safe seat for them since Alex Salmond won it off the Conservative Albert McQuarrie in 1987.

But while voters here do care about independence, Europe and all the rest, it’s the very definition of local issues that is causing some distress in the North East.

How can local issues in Peterhead be the same as local issues in Portsoy?

Stevie Calder, now retired, was a music teacher at Peterhead Academy for decades and is putting himself forward as an independent, partly because he wants to put the local back into local politics.

The left-wing, independence-supporting National reader says the decisions of planners and councillors in “remote” Aberdeen to grant permission for the development of shopping facilities on the outskirts of the town has led to Peterhead town centre “feeling quite desolated and underused”.

In the past 12 months, planners have backed proposals for 1100 new houses in Peterhead with a further 210 set to be built in Wester Clerkhill, and plans are afoot to move the academy out of the city centre.

“This would have a devastating effect on the town centre,” Calder says, “both in terms of schoolkids buying food at lunchtimes, and the accessibility of the community facilities for people in the town centre, which is already an area [on the Index of] Multiple Deprivation.”

In Ellon, locals have been waiting for the last six years for the council to come forward with plans to develop sites that were vacated when their academy moved into a new building.

There are similar stories throughout the shire. People in towns and villages and in the Aberdeenshire countryside for whom the council HQ feels as remote as Holyrood or Westminster.

In a weird quirk, councillors and staff have, for the last 21 years, met in Woodhill House in Aberdeen – making Aberdeenshire the only local authority in Scotland that doesn’t meet within its own boundaries. That has changed, however, with councillors backing by 40 to four to move to a new purpose-built building in Inverurie.

When the last session ended the SNP were the largest group on the council with 26 of the authority’s 68 councillors.

They were shoved into opposition when a Tory, LibDem, Labour and independent councillors coalition formed to take control. That partnership ended in 2015 after four councillors quit, accusing the Tory-led alliance of becoming “too Conservative”.

The SNP took control, joining with Labour and the self-styled Independent Progressive Councillors group, with the council’s leadership shared between independent Martin Kitts-Hayes and the SNP’s Richard Thomson.

The SNP are standing in the region with a promise to see at least 2500 affordable homes built over the next five years. The Conservatives have also promised to build more houses for social rent in the next five years.