THE Church Commissioners’ allocation of £100 million to handle the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade is “poorly justified, historically uninformed and overall inadvisable”, a recent report from the thinktank Policy Exchange concludes.
The Case Against Reparations: Why the Church Commissioners for England must re-examine was written by Charles Wide KC, a retired Old Bailey judge and lay reader; the Revd Professor Lord Biggar, Regius professor emeritus of ethical and pastoral theology at Oxford University; and Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, director of the advocacy group, Don’t Divide Us.
It is now two years because the Commissioners announced a programme of impact investment, grant-making, and further research value £100 million to mitigate long-term consequences of their fund’s reference to the transatlantic slave trade (News, 13 January 2025). The impact investment fund is to be directed to projects that address the “after-effects of slavery”.
The proposals have proved deeply contentious. The Policy Exchange report follows questions at General Synod, critiques by historians (Letters, 28 June 2024), and “lots of and lots of” of letters of grievance, in keeping with Archbishop Justin Welby (News, 14 April 2023).
The report argues that the fund represents “a departure by the Church Commissioners from their core duties, of which international reparatory justice shouldn’t be one, nevertheless worthy or not it is likely to be within the abstract; and a diversion of funds intended for the nice of parishes to a purpose for which they weren’t intended”. It diagnoses within the rationale for the investment “insufficiently examined preconceptions and contentious moral and political theory”, “flawed, narrowly selective, anachronistic historical understanding”, and “a defective process”, which “embedded activism reasonably than balance”, and is “racially discriminatory in formulation and final result”.
In his contribution, Judge Wide warns that the Commissioners’ decisions have contributed to an “ongoing break-down of trust between the Church’s leadership and its grassroots within the parishes”. He scrutinises the report produced for the Commissions exploring links between Queen Anne’s Bounty and the slave trade and suggests that its “uncertain, heavily caveated conclusions . . . have been depicted as more emphatic and more far reaching than they were.” He draws on a paper written by Professors Robert Tombs and Lawrence Goldman published online last 12 months on the History Reclaimed website, which concluded that the Bounty “didn’t derive any income from slave trading throughout the temporary period when it held shares within the [South Sea] Company”.
Judge Wide can also be critical of the work of the Oversight Group formed to advise the Commissioners on the fund — including its methodology— and of the Commissioners’ acceptance of its recommendations without consultation.
He notes that the impact investment fund shouldn’t be yet in operation and suggests that this is said to ongoing discussions with the Charity Commission in regards to the legality of the project. He warns of “confused constitutional arrangements and lack of accountability within the governance of the Board and the institutional Church”.
Lord Biggar’s chapter (“Slavery reparations: why they don’t add up”) refutes quite a lot of assertions made in favour of reparations, critiquing the case made by the Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, Dr Michael Banner (Books, 23 August 2024). He draws attention to the work of abolitionists and argues that “the humiliation and cruelty of British slave-trading and slavery was unique neither in kind nor degree.”
Dr Cuthbert warns that “aside from being weak by way of historical explanatory power, history mobilised for social justice causes is more likely to divide.” Calls for reparations “require a hostile orientation to Britain’s past historical and cultural achievements that are alleged to be the first reason behind present day problems”. They “express the interests of an elite minority of institutional leaders, including those within the Church of England, who’re to be distinguished from the vast majority of individuals who work in them, use their services, or are abnormal clergy and parishioners”.
She writes: “To accept the claims of the reparations lobby is to entrench the principle of injustice, or a minimum of of partial justice. It is to entrench a vision of ourselves as fundamentally unequal and as such, represents a backwards step politically and morally.”
The last chief executive of the Church Commissioners, Gareth Mostyn, has defended the study of the fund’s links to transatlantic slavery, conducted by library and archive staff, forensic accountants, and historians (Comment, 14 June 2024). “The degree of “profiting” shouldn’t be the difficulty: any financial involvement on this vile practice can be an excessive amount of,” he has said. “Congregations aren’t being asked to search out money to assist us get to this £100-million figure, as some have implied: not a penny donated to a parish church might be used to ascertain this fund.”
The History Reclaimed paper points out that Commission funds include former parish and diocesan funds administered until 1948 by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.
