The Church of England has been told to raise £1 billion from wealthy donors for a fund set up to address its links to transatlantic slavery after being told the £100 million it has already set aside is “insufficient”. The Telegraph has the story.
In January last year, the Church Commissioners, who handle more than £10 billion of assets for the Church of England, announced the establishment of a £100 million fund to “address past wrongs of slavery”.
The pledge came following the publication of a report which found that much of the institution’s wealth originates from the slave trade.
A report published on Monday by an independent Oversight Group has concluded that the £100 million fund will be too small and too slow to deliver on its aims, as it called for the target to be increased to £1 billion.
However, the Church of England is being urged to raise the remaining £900 million from wealthy donors, companies and investors. It is hoped that the extra funding, combined with the interest accrued by the fund, will allow the church to reach its new target.
The Group said that the Church Commissioners had “embraced a target of £1 billion for a broader healing, repair and justice initiative with the fund at its centre” because the original £100 million sum is “insufficient” to counter the “historic and enduring greed, cynicism and hate with penitence, hope and love”.
It added that its original nine-year timeframe has also been judged too long and, as a result, the Church Commissioners will disburse their £100 million over five years.
Following consultation with members of the global African diaspora, the report recommends that the new impact investment fund be called the Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice and that it will invest in members of disadvantaged black communities, aiming to “back their most brilliant social entrepreneurs, educators, healthcare givers, asset managers and historians”.
The recommendations call on the Church Commissioners to use this fund to invest in black-led businesses focusing on education – such as schools, or a community-run pharmacy chain to improve health outcomes – and access to land and food as well as provide grants to address these and other issues brought up for communities impacted by the legacies of African chattel enslavement.
The Church’s endowment fund can be partly traced back to 1704 when Queen Anne’s Bounty was established to help support impoverished clergy. Queen Anne’s Bounty funds were subsumed into the Church Commissioners’ endowment when it was created in 1948.
In 2022, the Church of England announced for the first time – “and with great dismay” – that the Bounty had invested significant amounts of its funds in the South Sea Company, which was founded in 1711 and shipped enslaved people from Africa across the Atlantic.
The Church estimated that the South Sea Company transported 34,000 slaves “in crowded, unsanitary, unsafe and inhumane conditions” during its 30 years of operation.
Asked how the Church was planning to raise the £900 million, Geetha Tharmaratnam, Vice-Chairwoman of the independent Oversight Group, said: “The intention is that this is a fund that can be taken to peers of Church Commissioners, to pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, to impact investors, foundations, family offices, exactly the kind of investors who are looking to create positive change for the future.
“And in doing so, our hope is that we will get to the billion pounds that we have set as an intention and strong target.
“There is room for this to get to a billion and beyond,” she added. “And for us as an Oversight Group to have suggested a smaller number would have not given sufficient service to what this fund can accomplish.”
Worth reading in full.
Not a day seems to go by at the moment without a story about the Church of England outdoing itself with outrageous wokery, each instance more extreme and ridiculous than the last. First we had the parish ‘race action plans‘, then the ‘deconstructing whiteness‘ officer and now this, all in one week!
How does the church signalling it has hundreds of millions of pounds to give away to shameless race grifters encourage churchgoers to hand over their hard-earned money? If it can raise £900 million from ‘wealthy donors’ to splurge on race-baiting, people will ask, why doesn’t it do more to help struggling parishes who can’t afford to fix the roof or pay the vicar?
When will they realise it’s a con? Slavery was abolished nearly 200 years ago, thanks mainly to Great Britain including many Anglican churchgoers such as William Wilberforce. None of the beneficiaries of this obscene new largesse will have been slaves and none of those being fleeced were slave owners. As 2021’s Sewell report showed, any extant disparities between blacks and whites in Britain (and in fact those disparities only exist for certain black communities) have no connection to historic slavery – why would they? It ended centuries ago.
Why should well-off black people – many of whom may be descendants of slavers as the trade was prevalent across Africa – be given preferential treatment over poor people from other ethnic groups? Why should race be used to discriminate between people at all? One would hope the church should know better than this.
The Church of England appears to have allowed itself to have become captured by race-baiters who are happy for the institution’s finances and reputation to be shredded to advance a divisive, evidence-free agenda of racial discord that just happens to shower cash on them and their associates.
It’s tragic, really, to see a once respected institution being fleeced in broad daylight. Church leaders need to realise when they’re being had and tell the scammers to take a hike. In truth, one suspects this is only the start of the shakedown.
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