English Script Request

[Male announcer 1]: This is the BBC.

[Female announcer 1]: This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK.

[Male announcer 1]: You are listening to a program from BBC Radio 4.

[Male announcer 2]: The Reverend Lucy Winkett, rector of Saint James', Piccadilly.

[Rev. Lucy Winkett]: Good morning.

Within walking distance of where I live are the studios for Russia Today. This TV station is just one of the players under examination in a review of Russian political influence in the UK that’s being so forcefully debated following the delayed publication of the Intelligence and Security Committee report this week.

For most of us citizens the whole apparatus of intelligence gathering seems far away from daily life. The activity of spies, who operate often at an intersection between the boundaries of diplomacy, political judgement, and military force, is something that frankly we often would rather not know about. But the Christian spiritual tradition will always want us to emphasize our interdependence with one another. We need one another. No one is an island. The people are policed by the people, and the people are protected by the people. Spooks are not a class apart or a different breed, and it's surely unethical in itself to expect others to compromise their own integrity, so we the people can keep ourselves pure somehow and preserve ours.

What's more, is it always the morally right thing to do to tell the unvarnished truth? I might assume that of course it is, but if I were living in a police state and were hiding a persecuted person in my house, would I lie when the officer came to the door? I hope that I would have the courage to do just that.

The context and methods for espionage evolve, but old dilemmas remain. In a new world of cyber-espionage, deception takes on new forms and is, arguable, easier with less accountability online. And the power and reach of propaganda is vastly increased in a world of State news. And if a new tool is, for example, the deployment of wealthy oligarchs; again, methods may evolve but the fundamental challenge remains for any state and individual: the ethical use of power that follows the money.

In the knowledge that all states engage in espionage, not only with relation to their enemies but to their friends, a Christian ethic of loving my neighbor my seem fanciful and simply not appropriate when scaled up to the level of a nation. But to be a champion of the poorest and least powerful in the world is imbedded in Christ’s teaching about what it is to be a good neighbor. Standing up for them inevitably means standing up to the abuse of power and the manipulation of information, wherever it’s found, knowing that the only place to start is with the dissembling we know we are capable of ourselves.

[Male announcer 2]: That was Thought for the Day with the Reverend Lucy Winkett.