Bishop Richard’s Weekly Video Message and Transcript 24.09.2026

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Bishop's Weekly Video Message #305 – 24.09.2026

Video for 24^th September, 2026

Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.

As I record this, I’m glad for a good microphone, otherwise you would be hearing some rather loud music from across the river.  It seems to be largely 1980’s punk which takes me back to my misspent youth in London. I’m alarmed that not only can I tell you all the band’s names but mostly also know the lyrics.

Anyway, last week was one of my duty weeks in the House of Lords.  By and large it’s a very different experience to the ding dongs in the Commons. It isn’t unusual to hear people on both sides of the house commending colleagues in other parties, both for the quality and insight of speeches and even for policies that they agree with. Political discourse in the media tends to be far more polarised.  Policies of the other party are the worst thing ever to have been dreamed up in the history of the nation – even though they may be policies begun by the previous administration! The Lord’s purpose is as a revising chamber, taking legislation from the Commons, scrutinising it and seeking to iron out unforeseen consequences. You can’t really do that unless there is a preparedness to compromise, listen and sometimes change your view without it being described pejoratively as a screeching U-turn. It contains people with extraordinary expertise honed over long careers.  The legislation which emerges, which we as law abiding citizens have to submit to, is immeasurably better for such scrutiny.

One of the speeches I made last week concerned the use of deep fakes generated by AI. Last year an MP was pictured in a deep fake video defecting to Reform. He hadn’t! A deep fake video of a conservative peer had her standing in front of a brand-new Rolls Royce with text saying she was worth it or words to that effect. She is a delightful woman; such behaviour would be completely out of character. Democracy requires trust to function properly. If you cannot trust the imagery you see and the words you read as actually coming from the person who is purported to say them, the whole decision-making process is distorted. It isn’t simply direct falsehoods that we should be concerned about, but the whole environment.  Character assassination takes many different forms – a distorted image here; a slight misquote there.  Cumulatively, you can get a picture of someone that is simply wrong. Given that there is still remarkable consensus really about the economy, such slight distortions can steer outcomes of the democratic process.

The ten commandments have been described as God’s irreducible principles for living.  Most of our moral choices can be extrapolated out from them. Commandment nine covers this area fairly well. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbour. Or as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, ‘false witness’. I remember succumbing to unvicar like language with some scaffolders in my parish in Sussex when it became apparent that they had blatantly lied to me. They said they would be bringing some parts we had waited for the following day when they could see out of the window that the parts hadn’t arrived yet. Its very difficult to operate civil society if lying becomes an acceptable activity.  But false witness can take many forms up to and including downright lying. We tell stories to one another of our life experience making us sound more heroic than we really were. Subtle omissions of key facts easily distort the picture, making other perspectives appear foolish. There is a place (as in the well-known incident with a civil servant in a public enquiry a few years ago) to be economical with the truth. Our friends in a local regiment don’t tell us what they are up to for very good reasons of national security and their safety.  That’s necessary confidentiality, not false witness. There is a sense in which personal holiness is about how our lives are lived by these principles.  In my own life, I recognise I am much more likely to judge others in their shortcomings in those areas than I am to allow the Holy Spirit to convict me in mine. I think Jesus said something too about specks and logs. May he deliver us from the logs in our own eyes that we can genuinely help one another grow into the likeness of Christ. And praise the Lord for the gift of forgiveness.  How we need it.

And, ah, now we’re on the Sex Pistols over the river, so its probably time to stop. I hope next week will be something from Tanzania.

+Richard