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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All should state clearly ——–“Not with my money you won’t”. ——-Then they should ask the Church “Where is this Social Justice in the Bible”?
I have always supported my local church as it is part of my rural community. We now have one vicar for five parishes. The local people of Christian faiths and none have held and supported events to keep the roofs on and help repair the churches as we get nothing from the upper echelons except more “bishops and bureaucracy”.
My atheist husband is on the churchyard mowing rota.
If the CoE goes down this route, then I can see many of us rethinking. Although they know that because we value our communities, we will carry on.
I don’t think we are the hypocrites here.
Good grief. 10 billion in assets and you get mugged for an entry fee – its definitely not a donation – before you can even get into the local cathedral. What a cash cow. No wonder the grifters are circling like sharks.
Let’s all sing together…
‘Donations to charities are just secondary taxation for the gullible.’
It won’t work – huge waste of money
Excellent article by Will Jones, whose last two paragraphs sum up the whole situation perfectly, not pulling any punches:
“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.”
I don’t think that’s Church leaders being had, rather Church leaders collaborating with their buddies to asset-strip the church using whatever pretexts seem suitable for that.
And Somebody bought shares of some profitable and legal business 300 years ago is a pretty strenuous pretext. Especially when combined with statements like in crowded, unsanitary, unsafe and inhumane conditions, this being true for all of the 18th century and well into then 20th.
Reparations made to descendants of victims of the slave trade should be equal to a charge made for the same descendants having access to aircraft, running water, railways, flushing toilets, escalators, electricity, the internet, radio, television, books, cars, double glazing, mobile phones, jet engines, microwave ovens, dishwashers etc and countless other ‘colonial’ inventions.
Why should they get money for the downside but get the upside free?
What about the genuinely poor in any of our communities who might now be suffering serious financial hardship as a result of the tories wholly engineered cist of living crisis?
Charity begins at home.
There are some genuinely poor living in a salvation army hostel close to my flat. When they’re not busy throwing around the wheelie bins in our backyard to see if something sellable can be found in them or stealing them outright (wheelie bin can be sold as well) or dumping their used syringes there, they’re using it as open-air toilet. There must be a whole tribe of these people happily living and procreating in this building, all at the expense of others who have to work for this privilege.
Ok so we might as well close the whole operation down flog the rest of the churches that are not already mosques & flea markets .. mind you we’ll probably get good deals on our mats for kneeling from said markets ! We are finished if one penny of that Bullshit made up repayment thing gets paid
I wonder if the bishops and associated C of E hierarchy would agree to oh, let’s see…a twenty percent pay cut. You know the same tax that the Welsh government is intending to impose on their farmers.
Abandon Ship ,May Day , May Day ! Oh SH1T , no one’s coming ! Mom , help ,she would have but she’s gone
Back in the 1980s the C of E had a financial crisis partly due to poor investments. Parishioners were asked to stump up cash to help.
These clergy don’t appear to understand their own faith. Christianity demands that one repents one’s own sins, not those of others. And certainly not sins committed centuries ago by others.
What if trying to assuage resentment by paying money turns out to be like trying to slake thirst by drinking seawater? And isn’t it a microaggression to pay people of African heritage with sterling, the currency used to purchase slaves?
Reparations are usually paid by the defeated. Germany had to pay for losing the Great War. China for losing the Boxer rebellion. Germany would have only finished paying in the 1950s, and China had to deliver an amount equal to a year’s production of silver.
Reparations are usually paid by the defeated. Germany had to pay for losing the Great War. China for losing the Boxer rebellion. Germany would have only finished paying in the 1950s
German reparation payments for the first world war ran until 2010.
Not true. The Krauts never paid the reparations laid down in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. They couldn’t afford it, after the war their economy was wrecked. And then Hitler repudiated the Treaty.
Brilliant points, especially this one:
“Christianity demands that one repents one’s own sins, not those of others.”
Spot on!
I, like most of us, have been a slave of the damn greedy UK government for decades, paying the ever-increasing, inane taxes imposed on practically anything and everything, alongside varying impositions on our freedoms and choices. My ancestors, born and bred in the UK, were treated likewise.
As such, am I / we entitled to consideration for a handout from the spoils of all the nonsense ‘guilt-reducing’ – or are they ‘guilt-inducing’ – ploys and plots to redistribute monies? Where are the application forms?
Any paid for slavery should be directed to those suffering slavery today. That should stop those blagging us for a hand out, as they won’t be getting the money
I’m a practicing Christian. Make no mistake, Welby is Satan’s acolyte and must be removed. Dear Lord we pray
I think the Church of England needs to pay reparations to Catholics as their ancestors were burned/hanged and tortured for failing to renounce their religion in favour of the Cof E.
I think that the Italians should pay reparations to the British for enslaving our ancestors during the Roman empire occupation.
I think thepeopleof Scandinavia need to also pay us reparations for the Viking invasion.
likewise the French for the Norman Conquests.
That’s a good start, If I think up some more I will soon have enough money to buy me loads of stuff.
One of your statements is historically false. Only ONE CATHOLIC was ever burnt at the stake just for being Catholic, and that was somewhere in Eastern Europe. The only other Catholic was Michael Servetus, burnt by the mass murderer Calvin in Geneva, which the Inquisition applauded, not for being Catholic, but for disagreeing with both the Vatican and Calvin.
Protestants considered it too cruel and inhuman to burn someone alive for their faith, something you would never even do to an animal, though Protestants had suffered hundreds of their own burnt alive by Catholics, especially during Bloody Mary’s reign. Even Catholics in France were so horrified by one Jesuit priest who burnt a man alive head-first on a stake, that they got their pitchforks and ran him out of town.
As for witches, it was mostly Protestants who were falsely accused of witchcraft in order to seize their money and property, one-third of which went to the State, one-third to the Church, and one-third to the accuser. It was a nice little earner, “quids in” for everyone but the victim.
How does Welby decide who gets a slice of the big fat £1billion pie?
“Anyone with a kind of chocolatey skin colour gets £Xmillion, while anyone with a kind of milky skin colour gets nowt”
wow, nice policy, Archie, especially considering the congregation is almost entirely those of a milky colour. He’d be much better off trying to expand his congregation by offering financial, emotional, spiritual and community support to Britain’s young families who are struggling with the cost of living, and who are very worried about the state of the world they are raising their children in.
He might begin to regret it, as he sits freezing cold in his heat-pumped vicarage, while next door, unemployed Jadon and La’Toya lap it up in their newly purchased 18th century manor house, gas boilers ablaze 24 hours a day, thanks to the Church’s annual reparations cheque. They might be the only attendees on a Sunday now…
It will be easier for Islam to take hold in the U.K. when the Church of England goes out of the way to offend its congregation
Just as reparations should only be gathered from people who actually owned black slaves, reparations should be paid to only those who were actually slaves and worked on the plantations. Anything else is intellectual nonsense.
King Henry II had a good way of dealing with Archbishops with foolish opinions. I commend his method to our present rulers.