THE Church Commissioners’ allocation of £100 million to address the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade is “poorly justified, historically uninformed and overall inadvisable”, a new report from the think tank Policy Exchange concludes.
The Case Against Reparations: Why the Church Commissioners for England must think again was written by Charles Wide KC, a retired Old Bailey judge and a Reader; the Revd Lord Biggar, Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral and Pastoral Theology in the University of Oxford; and Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, director of the advocacy group Don’t Divide Us.
It is two years since the Commissioners announced a £100-million programme of impact investment, grant-making, and further research to mitigate long-term consequences of the transatlantic slave trade (News, 13 January 2025), after identifying a connection between it and their funds. 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 what the former Archbishop of Canterbury the Most Revd Justin Welby described as “hundreds and hundreds” of letters of complaint (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 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”.
It diagnoses in 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 rather than balance” and was “racially discriminatory in formulation and outcome”.
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 in the parishes”. He scrutinises the report produced for the Commissioner 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 and published online last year on the History Reclaimed website. This concluded that the Bounty “did not derive any income from slave trading during the brief period when it held shares in the [South Sea] Company”.
Judge Wide is also 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 is not yet in operation and suggests that this is related to ongoing discussions with the Charity Commission about the legality of the project. He warns of “confused constitutional arrangements and lack of accountability in the governance of the Board and the institutional Church”.
Lord Biggar’s chapter (“Slavery reparations: why they don’t add up”) rebuts assertions made in favour of reparations, criticising the case made by the Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, the Revd Dr Michael Banner (Books, 23 August 2024). Lord Biggar 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 suggests that “apart from being weak in terms of historical explanatory power, history mobilised for social justice causes is likely to divide.” Calls for reparations “require a hostile orientation to Britain’s past historical and cultural achievements which are alleged to be the primary cause of present day problems”. They “express the interests of an elite minority of institutional leaders, including those in the Church of England, who are to be distinguished from the majority of people who work in them, use their services, or are ordinary clergy and parishioners”.
She writes: “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.”
The Commissioners’ chief executive, 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’ is not the issue: any financial involvement in this vile practice would be too much,” he has said. “Congregations are not being asked to find money to help us get to this £100-million figure, as some have implied: not a penny donated to a parish church will be used to establish this fund.”
The History Reclaimed paper points out that Commission funds include former parish and diocesan funds administered until 1948 by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.
On Tuesday, Mr Mostyn said: “This report features factual errors and fundamentally mischaracterises our project — including the research carried out by independent, professional historians and forensic accountants, which established the fact that our predecessor fund was invested in a slave-trading entity.
“The Board of the Church Commissioners determined that, as a responsible investor, it is entirely right that we learn from our history and respond appropriately to these shameful findings, and we are now in discussion with the Charity Commission about the establishment of a new fund for healing, repair, and justice, and are exploring such authorisations as may be required.”