WE don't want it, but you can't have it.""

WE don't want it, but you can't have it."

That seems to be the latest message coming from North Somerset Council about its museum.

Just a week after campaigners celebrated Weston Town Council's radical plan to save the Burlington Street building, the outlook appears decidedly bleaker.

Unitary authority leader Nigel Ashton says handing the much-loved and historic site to the town council would 'achieve nothing'.

He is worried about simply transferring the museum's subsidy to the town's ratepayers.

But people who voted for town councillors in 2007 may read his statement in today's Mercury and ask 'why'?

After all, district members like Councillor Ashton are there to look after North Somerset's cash, not the precept paid by Westonians to their town council.

People may also question why, when he seems so determined to withdraw financial support for the museum in its current form, the Gordano representative is not jumping at the chance to offload it entirely.

The 'service', as council bosses insist upon calling it, started off life as Weston Museum.

People in the town could today be asking, given this generous proposal, why the town can't have it back.

POLITICS has no place in the administration of our children's education.

That's according to one wannabe school governor whose kind offer of help was rejected due to a Conservative party dispute this week.

John Ley-Morgan had received the papers and was ready to take his place as a governor of Uphill Primary, until Councillor Peter Bryant intervened.

Independent town councillor Ley-Morgan is a former teacher whose ward includes the village - qualifications that would seem to make him an ideal candidate for the post.

But Cllr Bryant has admitted stepping in for political reasons, motivated by the fact that his adversary left the Conservatives to stand against the party in a council by-election more than 15 months ago.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the argument, parents will rightly ask why Cllr Bryant is dragging a personal and political vendetta into the arena of primary school administration.

Perhaps long-serving Clarence and Uphill member Bryant would be better off leaving such squabbles in the playground?