The Church of England should abandon this misleading and expensive exercise in virtue signalling
Most Anglicans do not support the Church of England’s plan to allocate funds to slavery reparations. A December 2025 poll of 500 Anglican churchgoers revealed that 81 per cent expect the Church to support local parishes rather than use financial resources on reparations, 64 per cent believe it is “not the role of the Church Commissioners, using funds in their care, to atone for previous injustice such as slavery”, and 61 per cent would switch their giving to alternative charities, if the Church proceeds with its policy.
The background story is this. In 2019 the Church Commissioners for England, who are trustees of the Church of England’s endowment fund, appointed researchers to investigate whether a forerunner had links with the transatlantic slave trade. The forerunner in question was the Queen Anne’s Bounty, an 18th century fund devoted to supplementing the income of poorer clergy. In January 2023 a report was published, apparently demonstrating significant investments of the Bounty in the slave-trading operations of the South Sea Company. Without any consideration of the complicated ethical issues raised by this discovery, it seems, the Commissioners proceeded to commit the church to begin making reparations via “Project Spire”, to the tune of £100 million. They then established an independent, black-led Oversight Group to work out a plan of implementation. The Group reported in November 2023 and when their report was published in March 2024 under the title, Oversight Group Recommendations: Healing, Repair and Justice, it was publicly endorsed in full by the Commissioners, including both the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cotterell.
Then the trouble began.
After examining the historical evidence, the Emeritus Professor of International Banking at Southampton University and author of a book on the South Sea Company, Richard Dale, concluded that the Commissioners had misinterpreted it. Their statement that “a significant portion of the Bounty’s income during the 18th century was derived from sources that may be linked to transatlantic slavery, principally interest and dividends on South Sea Company annuities”, he judged “misleading on several fronts”. As he explained, “First, no investor in the South Sea Company benefited financially from the slave trade, since it was consistently loss-making. Second, the Church Bounty did not even stand to benefit from the trade, because it declined to buy shares in the Company. Third, the investments that it did make, in South Sea annuities, represented, at one remove, claims on the Government which had no connection with the trade in slaves”.
Next, when I, until three-and-a-half years ago holder of the Anglican world’s premier professorship in Christian ethics at Oxford University, went hunting for the Commissioners’ ethical justification of Project Spire, I discovered there was none. The thorny ethical questions about what present generations are obliged to do about the not-uncommon sins of some of their ancestors two centuries ago had not been worked through — at least, not in any document visible to the public. For example, why pick out British involvement in African enslavement as something extraordinary? Over more than a century-and-a-half from 1650 some Britons were involved in trading 3.258 million of the 12.75 million Africans transported across the Atlantic — just over a quarter of the total. Whereas in about 1850 the indigenous Fulani people in now northern Nigeria were running vast plantations where they employed 4 million African slaves all at once. Next, were the living and working conditions of slaves in the West Indies really much worse than those of industrial workers in the slums of early Victorian England? Further, what about all the Anglicans who spent their lives committed to abolishing slavery in the British Empire and suppressing all over the world — do their heroic efforts count for nothing? And, further still, as for the “intergenerational trauma” allegedly suffered by the descendants of African slaves today, how come those descendants in Barbados are faring far better on average than Nigerians, some of whom are descended from slave-raiders, -traders, and -owners? Has the quality of postcolonial government nothing to do with it?
The Commissioners and the Oversight Group appear to have functioned as echo chambers, their members all sharing the same assumptions cosily untroubled by such questions. Yet due diligence requires any body of trustees to test its assumptions before embarking on an expensive and controversial venture. As the Charity Commission itself prescribes, “constructive debate and challenge are signs of healthy governance” and “trustees should “critically and objectively review proposals and challenge assumptions in making decisions … Trustees who simply defer to the opinions and decisions of others aren’t fulfilling their duties”.
Since early last year, a group of us have been lobbying the Church Commissioners to pause and think again
Finally, Charles Wide, KC, a former Old Bailey judge, began to examine the legal basis on which the Church Commissioners had launched their project and concluded that they had acted ultra vires — beyond their legal authority. This was confirmed when he discovered that the Commissioners, having realised their mistake, had decided to apply to the Charity Commission to set up a new charity that would do what, legally, they now know they cannot.
Since early last year, a group of us have been lobbying the Church Commissioners to pause and think again. Alongside me, Charles Wade, and Richard Dale, there stand Oxford historian Lawrence Goldman, Cambridge historian Robert Tombs, the Anglo-Indian director of the anti-racist body “Don’t Divide Us”, Alka Seghal-Cuthbert, and the eminent descendant of African slaves brought to Jamaica, Lord Tony Sewell.
The Church, in the form of the Church Commissioners for England, has — as I have previously written for The Telegraph — reacted less than thoroughly or effectively. A few months after Policy Exchange’s publication of three essays by me, Charles Wide and Alka Seghal-Cuthbert (The Case Against Reparations, 1 February 2025), a document appeared on the Church of England’s website, entitled, “Independent responses to claims criticising the historical basis of the Church Commissioners’ research”. Any literate person, in this author’s opinion, would take the word “independent” to mean “disinterested”. Yet one of the authors, Professor Richard Drayton, has been officially involved in Project Spire since July 2023. Therefore, the document’s title seems inadequate.
Another document to which Professor Drayton was party, Oversight Group Recommendations, alleges that transatlantic slavery “was central to the growth of the British economy of the 18th and 19th centuries and the nation’s wealth thereafter”. The scale of slavery’s contribution to Britain’s industrial prosperity is very much a contentious question. Most historians have concluded that it fell between small and modest. David Eltis — who, according to the African American historian, Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University, is “the world’s leading scholar of the slave trade” — has made the case that slavery’s effect on the economy of Liverpool, the major slaving port in 1750, was not central, but “trivial”. If Professor Drayton can subscribe to such assertions, his authority seems questionable.
Then, at a fringe meeting of the General Synod on 14 July, Charmaine Simpson, Project Spire’s Research Engagement Co-ordinator, accused critics of “deliberate misinformation” and “disinformation”. Such words describe the intentional spreading of falsehoods — lying, in other words. Since I and my associates are the only public critics of the project, the Church Commissioners have, in effect, charged us with lying. At the meeting were three Church Commissioners and the project director, Gordon Jump. None of them disowned Ms Simpson’s totally groundless accusation.
Finally, the Commissioners have admitted in writing that they intend to respond to us as little as possible, so as not to attract public attention to our criticisms of what they have done. In addition, they have made several veiled threats of taking legal action against one of us. Does this all sound like an appropriate response to substantive criticism, presented in good faith? It seems like quite the opposite.
If all this is not enough to persuade the Charity Commission to turn down the Church Commissioners’ application to set up a new charity, then perhaps the prospect of aggrieved Anglican churchgoers refusing to give money to the church, even funding an application for judicial review, will.
