BBC Search Censorshit

Someone, somewhere is pulling some strings at the BBC in relation to the events of 7 July in what appears to be an effort to obfuscate the omnipresence of Peter Power on the day of 7/7, and in a couple of other situations where there's been a vague sniff of disaster on the Underground.

In the early hours of this morning, The Antagonist was following up stories about Peter Power on the BBC web site, links to which were left by Bridget Dunne in the comments to this post.

The stories in question were:

ON THIS DAY | 23 | 1984 - 'Pied Piper' of the Underground

On 23 November 1984, off-duty police officer Peter Power had fallen asleep while commuting home on the London Underground, when he was suddenly woken by the sound of slamming windows.

Inspector Power realised smoke was pouring into the train and the people around him were beginning to panic - so he decided to take action.

The story goes on to describe how Power, the 'pied-piper of the underground' commandeered the train, lied to the passengers via the train's public address system, and then punched the train driver in the face when he might have threatened Power's dominance.

The second story is:

ON THIS DAY | 18 | 1987 - Disaster underground

Inspector Peter Power was sent to the scene of the King's Cross fire to co-ordinate the efforts of the emergency services.

This is a bizarre tale of being ferried around at high speed by drunken officers, commandeering pubs, long-standing acquaintance with Ian Blair (now Metropolitan Police Commissioner), and various other interesting little anecdotes.

Both of these stories impart information about Peter Power's character and are worth reading to get a vague idea of the sort of person with whom we are faced in relation to 7 July.

Reading these stories prompted The Antagonist to search the BBC for additional stories related to "Peter Power" (searched for within quotation marks to find the exact term) and, at the time, the search returned two links, one each to the 'On this day' pages listed above.

No problem so far.

This morning, however, the same search for "Peter Power" on the BBC web site no longer turns up any results at all, meaning that stories about Peter Power have now become lost in 43 pages of other stuff.

How strange. Or perhaps it isn't, when you think about it.

Power by name, power by nature.