Sir, In response to the piece on community benefit and Newburgh Community Trust; Murdo Fraser is calling a spade a spade.
Community benefit is an inducement to buy support for a planning application and is one way of trying to make an unacceptable proposal acceptable.
Whether the money comes from the developer as a community benefit or to a community trust in grants to process an application for their own wind turbine or farm the public always pays one way or another.
The Newburgh Community Trust’s efforts to become a wind farmer were doomed from the outset by proceeding with an overblown project on an extremely sensitive site and the best part of £300,000 of taxpayers’ money was squandered on consultants.
That sum was in the form of a soft loan. Win planning permission and pay it back or fail and the loan is written off. The same sort of money is being “invested” by the Scottish Government on similarly daft schemes.
One is at Tillyrie near Milnathort on a site where previous applications have been refused planning permission and an appeal dismissed by a Scottish Government Reporter.
Not much joined-up thinking there, then.
And over in Argyll a similar grandiose scheme near Cove has just been recommended by planners for refusal but not before a packet of all our money has been gobbled up getting it to this stage.
Another thing that is unpleasant about community benefit is that it can be extremely divisive and divide communities rather than bringing them together.
Graham Lang. Westermost, Coaltown of Callange, Ceres, Cupar.
Harris was an inspiration
Sir, Until I read Jim Crumley’s vituperative diatribe about Harris Academy teaching standards in the late 1950s and 1960s, I thought the pen was mightier than the wrecking ball. Now I am not sure. I, too, was a pupil in that era, jammed with Jim on guitar, and joined The Courier as a trainee reporter on exactly the same day he did.
There were many fine, dedicated teachers. How else would I have known that the wretched, much-maligned (by Jim Crumley and others) school song “Hurrah for the heath-clad mountains” etc has two time signatures 6/8 and 2/4? If Jim did not get his inspiration for the great outdoors from that anthem, where else could it possibly have come from?
My attitude to gambling and investment was shaped by a famous maths teacher who offered me £5 in 1960 to climb up one side of a revolving blackboard and down the other without falling off. I declined and have wondered ever since if my £5 would be a fortune now, or simply a drop in the bucket of a banker’s bonus.
If Jim had been at the same reunions I was at he would have had a great time . . . especially when they locked the doors and made us sing the school song. My musical inspiration was sown at Harris, as was my love of the English language.
At least Jim and I probably still agree that Duane Eddy, Hank Marvin, Bert Weedon and Les Paul were good enough to have made the school orchestra.
Michael Mulford. 82 Hogarth Drive, Cupar.
John is “getting behind it”
Sir, I write in response to Helen Brown’s column in Friday’s Courier and in particular her comments about John Suchet. I am delighted to be able to tell her that the City of Discovery Charity Concert has pre-empted her request for Mr Suchet to “Get here and get behind it, John” by asking him to become a patron of the charity.
Mr Suchet has readily agreed and it is hoped he will be present at the next Discovery Charity Concert in 2015.
K M Murray. Director, City of Discovery Charity Concert.
We won’t last that long
Sir, Life on Earth: a billion years left (The Courier, July 2). Perhaps so, but as far as we humans are concerned I would not bet on even a fraction of that time!
Considering that “humans” first appeared around two million years ago a mere blink-of-an-eye in time much has been achieved from a mechanistic viewpoint.
However, it would seem that while we share the same basic life-supporting requirements, we are, alas, unable to share a common ideology. Under existing human-lifestyle scenarios it is extremely unlikely that humans will survive beyond another 500 years, unless we evolve into some as yet undiscovered formto be found, far into the future, by aliens.
Kenneth Miln. 22 Fothringham Drive, Monifieth.
So, what about Lundin Ladies?
Sir, Alex Salmond refused to go to Muirfield for the Open golf competition because it was a men-only club. Yet more hypocrisy from this man as he searches hither and thither for more votes for his “yes” campaign.
He is well aware that Lundin Ladies is the oldest ladies golf club in the world and the only ladies-only golf club in Scotland. It is run solely by the ladies, has close to 300 members and has its own clubhouse, course and staff.
I heard no “This should not be allowed in this day and age” as he pontificated about Muirfield.
Clark Cross. 138 Springfield Road, Linlithgow.