UK: Should the Church Commissioners pay slavery reparations?

By Ian Paul

https://www.psephizo.com

April 10, 2025 

Project Spire is the name that has been given to the Church Commissioner’s decision to put aside £100m of their investments to be directed to working with and for communities affected by historic transatlantic slavery, with the intention that it creates a lasting legacy. The £100 million, which will be built up over the 9-year period of the three triennia through to 2031, sits alongside the £3.6 billion indicative distributions that the Commissioners have articulated for the corresponding periods.

I commented on this last year, noting the lack of evidence, the racist assumptions behind the goals of the project, and the way that this has been driven by ideology instead of Christian theology. For my troubles, I was identified in the Fifth Report of the Racial Justice Group as an ‘Anglican blogger’ who puts out a ‘false narrative’ that must be ‘suppressed’ (p 23). Actually engaging with the issues raised might have been more productive!

In February, the think tank Policy Exchange published a more detailed critique by four people: politician Lord Tony Sewell, Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at Oxford, Charles Wide KC, a retired Old Bailey Judge, and Dr Alka Seghal-Cuthbert, director of the race advocacy group Don’t Divide Us.

The executive summary offers a disturbing assessment of what Project Spire is doing and the way it has gone about it:

Collectively, these [papers] argue that the Church of England’s programme of reparations is problematic for two reasons:

(a) Firstly, it represents a departure by the Church Commissioners from their core duties, of which international reparatory justice is not one, however worthy or not it might be in the abstract; and a diversion of funds intended for the good of parishes to a purpose for which they were not intended.

(b) Secondly, that this specific act of reparatory justice is poorly justified, historically uninformed and overall inadvisable.

The reason for these claims is set out in the detailed problems with the Project’s approach:

It is contended that Project Spire is based on:• insufficiently examined preconceptions and contentious moral and political theory,• flawed, narrowly selective, anachronistic historical understanding,• a defective process which:

• embedded activism rather than balance,• paid insufficient regard to legal or ethical propriety, at the outset or later,• lacked transparency, true accountability, and breadth of reference,• failed to address authoritative critique,• failed to consider competing views about the principles of, and criteria for, reparation and failed to justify the project by reference to those principles and criteria,• was/is racially discriminatory in formulation and outcome,• failed to consider the risks of division and to the reputation and authority of the leadership of the Church in the eyes of its members and the wider public,• breached Charity Commission guidance on decision-making,• lacked due consideration of the legitimate prior claims on the money entrusted to the Commissioners – especially those of parishes, where preaching the Christian gospel and performing pastoral acts of charity most effectively take place and which should be the Commissioners’ highest priority.

These are serious charges; if they have any basis in truth, then it means that those working with the Commissioners fund are responsible for serious misuse of funds.

The first of the three essays, by Charles Wide, looks in detail at the process by which the project was developed, and the response to subsequent questions. In some ways, this feels like an odd place to start—until you recognise how important due process is, especially in relation to decision making in connection with substantial funds. Due process, including openness to questions, challenges, and alternative points of view, is the way in which we guard against the abuse of power, and it is something which has been perceived to be lacking in the Church of England leading to a serious erosion of trust.

Wide meticulously traces the process by which the fund was initiated, including the wider questions about race both within the Church and in wider society. In general terms, Wide notes:

It can therefore be seen how ingrained are the presuppositions and particular political stances amongst the Church elite and the way in which those presuppositions and stances are perpetuated and advanced by embedding activism in the Church’s processes. It can also be seen that, in terms of governance, there is substantial overlap between the institutional Church and the Church Commissioners (p 14).

Wide then goes on to explore the claims made in relation to the Queen Anne’s Bounty, and its involvement in the South Sea Company, which is the primary way in which it is claimed that the Commissioners assets ‘benefitted’ from slavery. He notes the detailed refutation of the claims of the Commissioners’ report by historians Robert Tombs and Lawrence Goldman, who comment:

However, while the connection of the Bounty with the slave trade was reprehensible and a proper cause of regret, it was certainly not the source of ‘a historic pool of capital’. The South Sea Company never made any profit from slave trading, and the Bounty did not derive any income from slave trading during the brief period when it held shares in the Company. On the contrary, its 1720 investment in shares made a disastrous loss, equal to 14 percent of its total portfolio.

There was and is therefore no ‘historic pool of capital’ derived from slave trading from which reparations today could reasonably be paid.

But, says Wide, these challenges have simply not been engaged with.

The Board did not cause the research and its conclusions to be reviewed or subjected to any external critical scrutiny. Had it done so, the flaws,which have since been revealed, would have become apparent. Nor did it conduct any wider consultation. Furthermore, it seems that the Board leapt straight to proposing reparations, without pausing to consider the competing theological and secular arguments relating to a fraught, contentious issue, about which sincere Christians disagree (p 18).

He then traces the failure to respond to questions and engage with critique, including the failure to give clear answers to questions asked in Synod. The most disturbing of these is the failure to address the question of the Commissioners’ charitable status, and the fact that the proposals are not legally allowable in the light of the Commissioners’ stated charitable aims. This has been important enough to have been raised in Parliament, by Katie Lam MP:

The funds that have been committed to projects via the Church of England’s reparations project are in fact for the upkeep of parish churches and the provision of salaries for the clergy. I know that the Second Church Estates Commissioner is dedicated to our parish churches and would not support anything unlawful, so will the hon. Lady please provide the grounds on which the Church Commissioners are authorised to allocate this money to aims for which it was not intended? What details can she share of the conversations that she has had with the Charity Commission to determine whether they can do this, as it seems to be unlawful?

The second essay in the paper is by Nigel Biggar, and explores the wider arguments about the need for reparation, in which he engages with the recent arguments from Michael Banner. He offers a robust assessment of the complexities in all of these debates:

History is replete with wrongs from which we now benefit. Little or nothing that we inherit is without historic taint. The present Church of England occupies cathedrals and churches seized by the state from Rome during the Reformation. Some of its present wealth was almost certainly squeezed out of overworked and under-rewarded medieval serfs and 19th century industrial workers.

So, the question of which past wrongs to address and how best to address them is a complicated one that needs a careful answer. Yet, nowhere have the Church Commissioners felt it necessary to give one (p 35).

In turn, he then explores the questions of African complicity in the slave trade, the nature of British slavery, the extent to which the British economy benefitted from slavery, the significance of abolition, the role of colonialism, and subsequent post-colonial developments. At one level, addressing these question can feel like cool detachment—but in fact Biggar is offering a response to the specific claims that have been made in support of the case for reparations.

Some of his most striking material comes in the assessment of the ‘credit’ side of the debate—the role of Britain in suppressing the slave trade, and the relation of missionary work to the elimination of slavery.

It is not true that slavery-suppression was simply a pretext for colonial expansion. While there were often multiple motives for that expansion, sincere humanitarian ones were certainly among them. The strength of abolitionist feeling in Britain in the early 1800s was so great that it did not relax after Parliament had been persuaded to abolish the slave trade and slavery within the British Empire; it went on to persuade the imperial government to adopt a permanent policy of trying to suppress both the trade and the institution worldwide…

In addition to the diplomatic velvet glove, the British also deployed the naval hard fist. The Royal Navy deployed up to 13 per cent of its totalmanpower in the West Africa Station, in order to stop slave-trading with the Americas…

Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape…“estimate the economic cost to British metropolitan society of the anti-slave trade effort at roughly 1.8 per cent of national income over sixty years from 1808 to 1867”.112 Although the comparisons are not exact, they do illuminate: in 2021 the UK spent 0.5 per cent of GDP on international aid and just over 2 per cent on national defence. Kaufmann and Pape conclude that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade (alone) in 1807–67 was “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history” (p 43).

In May 2024, Justin Welby visited Zanzibar, and in a sermon in Christ Church Cathedral criticised missionaries for treating Africans as inferior, and claimed that ‘we must repent and look at what we did in Zanzibar.’ Alexander Chula, who taught in Malawi for three years, commented:

I am curious to know who exactly the former Archbishop had in mind. [Anglican bishop John] Mackenzie’s successors gave everything they had to the region, and their graves litter Malawi, still venerated today. They committed to sharing the lives of local peoples and … approached their cultures with a curiosity and respect seldom matched by Western visitors today. The imputation that they treated Africans as inferior dishonours men who died precisely because they considered Africans as worthy of that sacrifice as anyone.

The final essay in the report is by Dr Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert, and she simply sets out how divisive is the kind of approach the Commissioners are taking to race and history.

Many people find it hard to speak freely, to question or to raise criticisms about demands made in the name of social justice. Often it is because they fear the consequences of being labelled as racist (p 53).

When the main message is that virtue and vice track skin colour rather than individual agency and intentionality, the results can only strengthen anti-democratic practices which divide us along lines of race. Worryingly, what we see in the calls for reparations today is not a call for justice to be applied, but the opposite. To accept the claims of the reparations lobby is to entrench the principle of injustice, or at least of partial justice. It is to entrench a vision of ourselves as fundamentally unequal and as such, represents a backwards step politically and morally (p 55).

John Root, who has long experience in leading and planting multi-ethic churches, is not uncritical of the tone of the report, but believes its key arguments are vital:

‘The Case Against Reparations: Why the Church Commissioners for England must think again’, by Charles Wide KC, the Rev’d Professor Lord Biggar and Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert’ is the first coherent and thorough push-back against the archiepiscopally inspired and Synod agreed ‘Project Spire’ to make reparatory payments to Caribbean or Caribbean-descended people for the evils of Britain’s importation and enslavement of African peoples in our Caribbean colonies.

We do need to find a better way to address these issues; this was the speech I wrote for the debate on race in Synod, but was not called to speak:

I am associate minister at a city centre church in a city which is highly ethnically mixed.  Around the time of the Black Lives Matter movement, we realized that the ethnic mix of those ‘up front’ did not match the ethnic mix of those ‘in the pews’. We knew change had to happen.  So we listened, we observed, and we encouraged.

We now have a very diverse group of leaders (you can check online); we have welcomed refugees and asylum seekers from Hong Kong, from Iran, from central America in particular. Our clergy team is white, black, Chinese, and Chinese American. In our services on Sundays we often have readings in four languages. We have a Spanish-speaking pastor funding through central funds. Last Sunday the sermon wasn’t even in English!

We celebrate our diversity and unity in Christ and we stand against racism wherever we find it. But we did it without ‘deconstructing whiteness’. We did it without using the language of ‘GMH’. We did it without specifying quotas. Rather, we did it by being captured again by the biblical vision of diversity we find in Acts 13, in Rom 16, and of course particularly Rev 7.9 (all the answers are found in the book of Revelation).

Our current course is damaging, divisive, and will not deliver. Lord Boating talked about theology; the theology we currently have in place is deeply damaging. The Formularies of the Church are claimed to be ‘inherently racist’. Taking the gospel to Africa is described as Afrophobic. This will not do—and it will not deliver what is needed.

The bishop of Dover is right: We need to take action, but we need to do it in a better way.

Finding a better way is now imperative for the Commissioners themselves. And it is deeply worrying that Synod and other bodies in the Church have not been able to ask effective questions about this.

In his introduction, Tony Sewell makes an urgent plea:

The Church of England’s leadership wished to find a way to turbocharge itself to the top of the race agenda. What better way than to offer an arbitrary figure like 100 million in reparations and link this to slavery. No one, from the Archbishop of Canterbury down, had the moral courage to stand up to the vagaries of the ‘diversity and inclusion’ propaganda. In many ways I have seen the way that activists have distorted the facts around transatlantic slavery to build careers, hustle grants and seek false compensation. This has been bolstered by universities, school curriculum and diversity agendas. Similarly, the Church of England avoids the deeper reflection required and has dived into the river, desperate to be seen as an institution that has been baptised and cleansed from the sins of institutional racism.

END