15 May (Part 2) - The artful fee dodger
The
first image shows what you currently get if you try to find The Arts Council of Bexley on
the web. Bit of a mess isn’t it? The Home page seems to have gone missing and it’s been like it for a week.
The Arts Council of Bexley is funded by Bexley
council taxpayers and has been accused of carrying links to Conservative party sites; something that has been
defended in the council chamber.
You can see by the list of folders that it includes folders for ETCA (Erith & Thamesmead Conservatives) and Lesnes (Lesnes
Abbey Conservatives). Thanks to this technical glitch I can now see with near certainty what councillor John Davey, who has
claimed responsibility for the website
in a letter to a newspaper, has been up to.
Apologies if this is a little bit on the techie side but councillor Davey has arranged that
his political domain names (the bit that goes before the .co.uk or whatever) doesn’t
go to web storage space that is dedicated to that domain which would be the orthodox way of going
about providing a website; he has fixed things so that his Conservative party address is
automatically redirected to the Arts Council of Bexley web space, thereby saving the
cost of buying web space for the Conservative party’s exclusive use. Cunning eh? Normally
the redirection would be masked from public view, the glitch has given the game away.
Note that the address bars (URL bar) in the images in the gallery section (click the picture) show artscouncilofbexley.org.uk
and not Conservative party addresses. The moral of the story is that if you are going to be a little underhand, make sure the
cover-up is foolproof.