The Coastal Regeneration Alliance must not allow further inane criticism of our campaign to go unchallenged.

Clearly confused, your correspondent (Courier, April 24) actually pays our steering committee a huge compliment when he imagines fewer than a dozen albeit right-minded amateurs prevailed over a £350 million pound p.a. Government development agency, allied to a well-funded local authority.

He compounds his naivety by reference to published exponents of the ‘conventional wisdom’, a philosophy little changed from the Iron Age. To be fair, however, even our early ancestors realised there was little point manufacturing something for which, like the energy park, there is no market.

The real heroes can be found among the 8,500 people who signed the CRA petition to the Scottish Parliament; extraordinary local people who kept faith.

I lean more towards the late John Kenneth Galbraith personally, author, statesman, presidential advisor and foremost economist of his generation. As with other masters of their craft, he was someone I was encouraged to look up to as a child, little realising until we met that, beyond his intellect, Ken’s 6ft 8ins frame made that obligatory.

I particularly commend ‘The Affluent Society’ which questioned the part played by “Iron Age economics” in modern society and where parallels with post-industrial sites such as Cockenzie are not hard to find.

Having questioned your correspondent’s grasp of economics, his knowledge of engineering is surely non-existent. For did Scottish Enterprise not first trumpet their plan for a “marine energy park” as a facility that would produce offshore wind turbines allied to a role repairing them?

Forgive me, but anyone who designs a massive generator to be erected atop a tower hundreds of feet up in the hostile conditions encountered in the North Sea, but which cannot have preventive and comprehensive corrective maintenance carried out on-site, would have to be stark raving mad!

Catastrophic failure, something these turbines’ integrated cooling, blade feathering and shaft braking systems are designed to prevent, would in any event likely result in a total loss, with little hope of prompt intervention or salvage.

I can forgive all this, however, for ignorance, as they say, is bliss. But what I will not forgive is that, by reference to such nonsense, your correspondent seeks to stigmatise pupils at Preston Lodge for what we increasingly learn are thinly veiled political motives; a cheap shot far beneath the belt. By contrast, one member of our steering group is president of that school’s former pupils’ rugby club; a lady first among equals in a male-dominated SRU, she has done more for youth in the community than Scottish Enterprise ever has.

I will concede this: the romantic if euphemistically named energy park, while surely never seriously considered for its advertised purpose, might have been intended for the manufacture of other plants. For this, think, ‘the energy that dare not speak its name’. Might not honesty have been the best policy?

For too long those in the west of our county have been the poor relations, a condition routinely compounded by political indifference, policy bias or worse. And so if your correspondent plans further reading, I commend to him also the Old Testament’s Deuteronomy, together with the prophets Matthew and Luke from the New, who teach us: “Man shall not live by bread alone.” David J Ostler Steering committee Coastal Regeneration Alliance The Coastal Regeneration Alliance must not allow further inane criticism of our campaign to go unchallenged.

Clearly confused, your correspondent (Courier, April 24) actually pays our steering committee a huge compliment when he imagines fewer than a dozen albeit right-minded amateurs prevailed over a £350 million pound p.a. Government development agency, allied to a well-funded local authority.

He compounds his naivety by reference to published exponents of the ‘conventional wisdom’, a philosophy little changed from the Iron Age. To be fair, however, even our early ancestors realised there was little point manufacturing something for which, like the energy park, there is no market.

The real heroes can be found among the 8,500 people who signed the CRA petition to the Scottish Parliament; extraordinary local people who kept faith.

I lean more towards the late John Kenneth Galbraith personally, author, statesman, presidential advisor and foremost economist of his generation. As with other masters of their craft, he was someone I was encouraged to look up to as a child, little realising until we met that, beyond his intellect, Ken’s 6ft 8ins frame made that obligatory.

I particularly commend ‘The Affluent Society’ which questioned the part played by “Iron Age economics” in modern society and where parallels with post-industrial sites such as Cockenzie are not hard to find.

Having questioned your correspondent’s grasp of economics, his knowledge of engineering is surely non-existent. For did Scottish Enterprise not first trumpet their plan for a “marine energy park” as a facility that would produce offshore wind turbines allied to a role repairing them?

Forgive me, but anyone who designs a massive generator to be erected atop a tower hundreds of feet up in the hostile conditions encountered in the North Sea, but which cannot have preventive and comprehensive corrective maintenance carried out on-site, would have to be stark raving mad!

Catastrophic failure, something these turbines’ integrated cooling, blade feathering and shaft braking systems are designed to prevent, would in any event likely result in a total loss, with little hope of prompt intervention or salvage.

I can forgive all this, however, for ignorance, as they say, is bliss. But what I will not forgive is that, by reference to such nonsense, your correspondent seeks to stigmatise pupils at Preston Lodge for what we increasingly learn are thinly veiled political motives; a cheap shot far beneath the belt. By contrast, one member of our steering group is president of that school’s former pupils’ rugby club; a lady first among equals in a male-dominated SRU, she has done more for youth in the community than Scottish Enterprise ever has.

I will concede this: the romantic if euphemistically named energy park, while surely never seriously considered for its advertised purpose, might have been intended for the manufacture of other plants. For this, think, ‘the energy that dare not speak its name’. Might not honesty have been the best policy?

For too long those in the west of our county have been the poor relations, a condition routinely compounded by political indifference, policy bias or worse. And so if your correspondent plans further reading, I commend to him also the Old Testament’s Deuteronomy, together with the prophets Matthew and Luke from the New, who teach us: “Man shall not live by bread alone.” David J Ostler Steering committee Coastal Regeneration Alliance