Can the C of E fulfil its plan to make recompense for the slave trade, churches as sanctuaries in immigration arguments, and some unedifying parliamentary ping pong
"I’m not accusing anyone of racism, but..." you say. As a person mentioned in this article, I'm very glad to hear it. One hopes that you aren't going to insinuate such an accusation in response to well-evidenced concerns are adduced about the moral, historical, legal and practical basis for Project Spire.
These concerns are legion, and have been written about in many places, but one might mention a few here:
1. The investment of the Queen Anne Bounty was in government securities, not the slave-trading arm of the SSC; there was no profit from those activities;
2. Mullally's statement may claim that they pay regard to the work and sacrifices of the Church and its members who fought against slavery, who gave up treasure and in many cases their lives in the struggle, but if these sacrifices are not acknowledged in the financial calculus of Project Spire, then this claim is just words;
3. The moral objection of the distance between the actual victims of slavery two centuries ago and those who will actually benefit from the £100m today (as raised by Nigel Biggar in his book "Reparations") remains unanswered; It does nothing to combat actual slavery which is still practised today in large parts of Africa and Asia, not to mention even within the UK itself;
4. Donations to charities are given for particular purposes, and it is unjust to alienate those donations to other and quite different purposes against the will of the original donor or purpose of the charity when that purpose still exists and can be fulfilled; it is spurious to say that the £100m belongs to a different pot and that it could never benefit the poor parishes and clergy who are still calling out for this support, as the money is fungible;
5. Spire actually works against the Church's Fourth Mark of Mission: ‘To transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and pursue peace and reconciliation’. It is unjust and divisive as it allots the spending of money and capital on the basis of skin colour, not actual need and merit. It will serve to set people against each other, rather than bring them together.
Hi Bijan, thanks for your comment (and sorry about the delay in responding). I'm no expert on the research into QAB, but trust that the Commissioners are not financial ignoramuses and that there is therefore at least an argument to be made that the investments into the South Sea Company did entangle it in the murky business of slaving (even if, as seems plausible, these investments did not actually return a profit). Their current ethical guidelines, for instance, do not prohibit investment in things like arms companies or pornographers only if they are profitable investments. They forbid all such investment even if no blood money is returned to the fund, because they see it as immoral to be involved in anyway with such companies or funds. I think the same calculus should apply to slavery.
There is, as I wrote, very legitimate disagreement about what to do with this knowledge or our predecessor's sinful investment practices. I have no issue with people arguing against the idea that we should put aside money today to try and undo or make recompense for it. I don't know exactly how you could calculate or quantify if British efforts to combat slavery post 1807 somehow undo the centuries of slaving before that. And, after all, that was primarily prosecuted not by the church or the Commissioners, but by the Royal Navy anyway.
I, personally, agree that direct reparations to descendants of slaves are not a good solution, so it's good that's not what the church is proposing. I think the idea of investing strategically in Caribbean institutions like universities and the like to try to encourage development in a community still blighted by the legacy of slavery is a much better way to try and make amends.
It would be truly impossible to align the Commissioners' spending to the wishes of the many, many people whose money has ended up in the pot now controlled by them. For instance, a large majority would be horrified to know that a small amount of the Commissioners' money funded my wife's PhD research while she trained to be a priest, given they would vociferously reject women's ordination (let alone allowing such women to study at a university like Oxford!). But, obviously, we don't entirely allow the prejudices of past centuries to overrule present church convictions about the equality of women. The overriding objective of the Commissioners must obviously remain to further the ministry of the C of E and the gospel, and I think it is easy to argue that an investment fund targeting the legacy of church-led slavery falls within those purposes.
The 'forensic accountants' did not understand history. They wrongly claimed that QAB had invested in the slave trade (it did not; it invested in government bonds). When this was pointed out, the CC rewrote their claim without admitting it. The idea that you can trace those affected by slavery is implausible. Slavery was indigenous to African culture, not invented by Britain. Britain invested billions in, uniquely, combatting slavery. Other damaging involvement by the Church (eg the oppression of the Irish) doesn't seem to count. The fund is doing nothing to tackle the real issue—modern slavery. The CC have failed to consult as promised. The whole thing is almost certainly illegal under charity law. And it is deeply divisive in parishes.
But apparently to mention any of this is either petty or racist. Seriously...?!
I'm not going to pretend I fully understand or can adjudicate about 17th-century financial investment practice. As I wrote, the research is contested. I am, however, confident that the Commissioners are not ignoramuses who know nothing of history, and that there is at least an argument to be made that their predecessor funds derived some financial benefit from enslaving fellow human beings (which, given the way slavery was entangled into the entire financial system at the time, pretty much every fund or investor probably did in some way). Nobody has claimed Britain invented slavery or carried it out alone, but that does not for a moment mitigate the sin our country did engage in for centuries by enthusiastically jumping aboard the slave trade for profit. Whataboutery about other sins the church has engaged in does not raise confidence in the quality of the opposition to Project Spire, if I'm honest.
I've never said that any opposition to Spire is wrong (let alone racist), quite the opposite. But I think a lot of the opposition is shabbily argued or wilfully misconstrued.
The survey of 500 Anglicans carried out by Merlin and reported in the Mail and Telegraph is worth a look - the data is published on the Merlin website, though I couldn't see immediately how respondents were recruited either.
For a start, about 40% of respondents (from memory! Don't have the data in front of me) attend church either once every couple of months or once or twice a year, so these are not frequent churchgoers. Not that that means they don't have a right to a view on Spire, of course - just that such views may not be reflective of more frequent churchgoers.
The responses to what would you do with your giving? type questions are also considerably more mixed than reported in the headlines. When asked whether people would decrease their giving to the CoE if Spire was progressed, something like 27% said yes, but 26% said they would give *more* and 41% would not change their giving. So it's not as clear cut as all that.
Thanks Gill, just found the Merlin data: 21% of the sample went to church no more than 1-2 times a year, 20% when every few months, 27% went at least once a month, and 31% went weekly. So of the standard cut off of at least monthly churchgoing only gets you 58% of your sample as you note. What I am also concerned about is that according to the data tables, 100% of the sample were Christians who identified as Anglicans. Which means they probably did not first gather a truly random and representative sample of thousands of Britons, and then drill down into the 500 who happened to identify as Anglicans. They more likely somehow recruited people who already said they were Anglicans - so this is possibly a self-selecting sample, of whom even the truly churchgoing ones are not at all representative of the average man or woman in the pews.
The questions on Spire are also ridiculously un-impartial: "Which is closer to your view: 'I expect the Church of England to be spending its money on issues such as slavery reparations' or 'I expect the Church of England to be supporting local churches especially when so many are in financial difficulties'." This is not truly neutral research, but polling as a PR strategy, designed entirely to produce the desired outcome with a veneer of academic credibility.
Obviously, the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament is specific to the Church of England as the Established Church and in that sense Anglicanism's unique legal status in England can be seen, but the Methodist Church of Great Britain operates within the framework of a Private Act of Parliament, namely the 1976 Methodist Church Act.
“Even if you sympathise with those Christians outraged by ICE (and pastors working with ICE), they are not going to win any more converts to their cause by angrily shouting in the faces of ordinary Americans in the pews who’ve come to church to worship God. It’s just bad politics, as well as unkind.”
the moral cowardice in this paragraph is appalling. shame on you.
There is, of course, value in prophetically standing up to challenge injustice or in solidarity with the suffering even when you know it is unlikely to alter events. But the person these protesters sought to challenge wasn't even in the room, they were instead getting in the faces of people who have absolutely nothing to do with ICE. If you actually want to protect vulnerable migrants and minorities, rather than performatively gain online clout, there are a million more direct and effective protest strategies, rather than aggressively disrupting the worship of innocent and unrelated Americans.
On the Tail that wags the dog, to allege that the Ecclesiastical Committee is repeatedly interfering when it has only done so twice since 2002 somewhat undermines the credibility of the attack.
On the Clergy Conduct Measure, the original proposal quite clearly was in breach of Article 6 of the ECHR and the Human Rights Act. The victims of abuse and the press are entitled to be present at a tribunal subject to restraints and arrangements to protect vulnerable witnesses. Open hearings are required in the Crown Court and the Family Court, as the Chair of the Ecclesiastical Committee, a former president of the Family Division, pointed out. As long as the Courts Ecclesiastical are English courts the CCM as drafted would have exposed the Church of England to the risk of being castigated in Strasbourg for denying the right of a victim.
On the Governance Measure, this originated in a report by Sir David Lidington. Although Sir David had been told that he was not to consider safeguarding (something most of us would consider of great relevance to governance) he ignored the instruction and included a specific point that there had to be an independent body to scrutinise safeguarding. The Governance measure contained no such provision and its clauses relating to the use of Church Commissioner moneys would make it impossible for the Commissioners to fund such a body directly. A body dependent on the benevolence of the apparatchiks in Church House for its operating budget is clearly not independent. The Ecclesiastical Committee was quite right to take a firm line.
Lastly, on other religious bodies, Parliament can if it wishes legislate. Indeed it is doing so at present - The Crime and Policing Bill currently in Committee in the Lords will impose penalties on religious bodies which fail to report abuse. Also any religious institution which is a charity is regulated by the Charity Commission can be told what it must do to maintain its charitable status.
If the committee had continued to stay in its box and nod synodical legislation through as it normally does than I would agree that the still disagreeable arrangement by which parliament gets to scrutinise the church's internal affairs would be tolerable. I'm not claiming parliament has a history of this, which is why the situation has remained unchallenged so long. But it's because all of a sudden this committee has begun to repeatedly interfere that the process, in my view, has become a problem.
If private hearings by default are such an egregious breach of human rights legislation (let's pause for a moment to acknowledge the irony of right-wing Conservative MPs who despise the ECHR and Human Rights Act and would love to abolish both, suddenly developing a deep affection for their provisions), then why did the CDM which had exactly the same process a) be allowed to exist for over 20 years with no hint of a Strasbourg challenge, and b) raise no qualms from these very same constitutional experts on the committee?
As repeatedly explained to the committee, the safeguarding independence arrangements are being legislated for separately from the governance reforms, which have been designed so to seamlessly adjust to the new safeguarding arrangements when they can be put in place. It is putting the cart before the horses to hold up the governance changes while we wait up to three more years for the independent safeguarding body to be introduced. Governance is not safeguarding, they are separate issues. The Church Commissioners point over accountability and money has also been repeatedly clarified and debunked for the committee (including by the commissioners themselves), to sadly to no avail.
Of course parliament can legislate for religious bodies when it comes to individual issues such as safeguarding or charitable status, but this is to ensure religious organisations are not above the law but accountable to exactly the same standards as any other private charitable organisation. The problem is not when parliament decide to impose a nationwide standard or requirement on the church (along with every other comparable institution) for the public benefit, but when it decides to compel the church alone to change its internal affairs because it believes it knows better than the church how it should be governed.
On your point about the CDM having a similar provision to the original draft CCM, but going unchallenged, there have been very few cases determined under the CDM (around 20 between 2020 and 2025). The defendant/respondent clergy cannot challenge because they have not asked for a public hearing. The rationale for the CCM is that it make it easier to bring cases. The provisions of the CCM remove episcopal discretion and hand decision to lawyers. So more cases can be expected. Further following Smyth/Makin we now have clear examples where victims may want open hearings.
So far no tribunal has been reported as deciding on an open hearing in a Makin/Smyth case but the President of Tribunals has taken to requiring (subject to the defendant's agreement) the Church to publish his reasoned decisions to dismiss cases. If a case does reach a tribunal - and owing to the secrecy of the NST we do not know if any have got that far - we may find either a victim or a media organisation challenging a hearing held in private under the CDM rule.
Both the abuse scandals and the increasingly bitter LLF controversy makes it likely that there will be protest over private hearings at some point. As long as the Tribunals (Courts Ecclesiastical) are part of the English legal system, and as long as the UK remains in the ECHR, Article 6 of the Convention applies. It would be folly to allow a provision that invites a reference to Strasbourg to be enacted. One wonders whether the Law Officers would not advise the government to oppose a Measure that so clearly was incompatible with Article 5 when it came to a Parliamentary vote.
Your comment on right wing Conservative MPs is unworthy of you. Concern about secret hearings was voiced by Marsh de Cordova (Labour) and Al Pinkerton (LibDem) and by the apolitical chair based on her experience as a leading judge.
"I’m not accusing anyone of racism, but..." you say. As a person mentioned in this article, I'm very glad to hear it. One hopes that you aren't going to insinuate such an accusation in response to well-evidenced concerns are adduced about the moral, historical, legal and practical basis for Project Spire.
These concerns are legion, and have been written about in many places, but one might mention a few here:
1. The investment of the Queen Anne Bounty was in government securities, not the slave-trading arm of the SSC; there was no profit from those activities;
2. Mullally's statement may claim that they pay regard to the work and sacrifices of the Church and its members who fought against slavery, who gave up treasure and in many cases their lives in the struggle, but if these sacrifices are not acknowledged in the financial calculus of Project Spire, then this claim is just words;
3. The moral objection of the distance between the actual victims of slavery two centuries ago and those who will actually benefit from the £100m today (as raised by Nigel Biggar in his book "Reparations") remains unanswered; It does nothing to combat actual slavery which is still practised today in large parts of Africa and Asia, not to mention even within the UK itself;
4. Donations to charities are given for particular purposes, and it is unjust to alienate those donations to other and quite different purposes against the will of the original donor or purpose of the charity when that purpose still exists and can be fulfilled; it is spurious to say that the £100m belongs to a different pot and that it could never benefit the poor parishes and clergy who are still calling out for this support, as the money is fungible;
5. Spire actually works against the Church's Fourth Mark of Mission: ‘To transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and pursue peace and reconciliation’. It is unjust and divisive as it allots the spending of money and capital on the basis of skin colour, not actual need and merit. It will serve to set people against each other, rather than bring them together.
Hi Bijan, thanks for your comment (and sorry about the delay in responding). I'm no expert on the research into QAB, but trust that the Commissioners are not financial ignoramuses and that there is therefore at least an argument to be made that the investments into the South Sea Company did entangle it in the murky business of slaving (even if, as seems plausible, these investments did not actually return a profit). Their current ethical guidelines, for instance, do not prohibit investment in things like arms companies or pornographers only if they are profitable investments. They forbid all such investment even if no blood money is returned to the fund, because they see it as immoral to be involved in anyway with such companies or funds. I think the same calculus should apply to slavery.
There is, as I wrote, very legitimate disagreement about what to do with this knowledge or our predecessor's sinful investment practices. I have no issue with people arguing against the idea that we should put aside money today to try and undo or make recompense for it. I don't know exactly how you could calculate or quantify if British efforts to combat slavery post 1807 somehow undo the centuries of slaving before that. And, after all, that was primarily prosecuted not by the church or the Commissioners, but by the Royal Navy anyway.
I, personally, agree that direct reparations to descendants of slaves are not a good solution, so it's good that's not what the church is proposing. I think the idea of investing strategically in Caribbean institutions like universities and the like to try to encourage development in a community still blighted by the legacy of slavery is a much better way to try and make amends.
It would be truly impossible to align the Commissioners' spending to the wishes of the many, many people whose money has ended up in the pot now controlled by them. For instance, a large majority would be horrified to know that a small amount of the Commissioners' money funded my wife's PhD research while she trained to be a priest, given they would vociferously reject women's ordination (let alone allowing such women to study at a university like Oxford!). But, obviously, we don't entirely allow the prejudices of past centuries to overrule present church convictions about the equality of women. The overriding objective of the Commissioners must obviously remain to further the ministry of the C of E and the gospel, and I think it is easy to argue that an investment fund targeting the legacy of church-led slavery falls within those purposes.
The 'forensic accountants' did not understand history. They wrongly claimed that QAB had invested in the slave trade (it did not; it invested in government bonds). When this was pointed out, the CC rewrote their claim without admitting it. The idea that you can trace those affected by slavery is implausible. Slavery was indigenous to African culture, not invented by Britain. Britain invested billions in, uniquely, combatting slavery. Other damaging involvement by the Church (eg the oppression of the Irish) doesn't seem to count. The fund is doing nothing to tackle the real issue—modern slavery. The CC have failed to consult as promised. The whole thing is almost certainly illegal under charity law. And it is deeply divisive in parishes.
But apparently to mention any of this is either petty or racist. Seriously...?!
I'm not going to pretend I fully understand or can adjudicate about 17th-century financial investment practice. As I wrote, the research is contested. I am, however, confident that the Commissioners are not ignoramuses who know nothing of history, and that there is at least an argument to be made that their predecessor funds derived some financial benefit from enslaving fellow human beings (which, given the way slavery was entangled into the entire financial system at the time, pretty much every fund or investor probably did in some way). Nobody has claimed Britain invented slavery or carried it out alone, but that does not for a moment mitigate the sin our country did engage in for centuries by enthusiastically jumping aboard the slave trade for profit. Whataboutery about other sins the church has engaged in does not raise confidence in the quality of the opposition to Project Spire, if I'm honest.
I've never said that any opposition to Spire is wrong (let alone racist), quite the opposite. But I think a lot of the opposition is shabbily argued or wilfully misconstrued.
The survey of 500 Anglicans carried out by Merlin and reported in the Mail and Telegraph is worth a look - the data is published on the Merlin website, though I couldn't see immediately how respondents were recruited either.
For a start, about 40% of respondents (from memory! Don't have the data in front of me) attend church either once every couple of months or once or twice a year, so these are not frequent churchgoers. Not that that means they don't have a right to a view on Spire, of course - just that such views may not be reflective of more frequent churchgoers.
The responses to what would you do with your giving? type questions are also considerably more mixed than reported in the headlines. When asked whether people would decrease their giving to the CoE if Spire was progressed, something like 27% said yes, but 26% said they would give *more* and 41% would not change their giving. So it's not as clear cut as all that.
Thanks Gill, just found the Merlin data: 21% of the sample went to church no more than 1-2 times a year, 20% when every few months, 27% went at least once a month, and 31% went weekly. So of the standard cut off of at least monthly churchgoing only gets you 58% of your sample as you note. What I am also concerned about is that according to the data tables, 100% of the sample were Christians who identified as Anglicans. Which means they probably did not first gather a truly random and representative sample of thousands of Britons, and then drill down into the 500 who happened to identify as Anglicans. They more likely somehow recruited people who already said they were Anglicans - so this is possibly a self-selecting sample, of whom even the truly churchgoing ones are not at all representative of the average man or woman in the pews.
The questions on Spire are also ridiculously un-impartial: "Which is closer to your view: 'I expect the Church of England to be spending its money on issues such as slavery reparations' or 'I expect the Church of England to be supporting local churches especially when so many are in financial difficulties'." This is not truly neutral research, but polling as a PR strategy, designed entirely to produce the desired outcome with a veneer of academic credibility.
Very much agreed. The questions are un-impartial, and do not allow for nuance.
As for recruitment, it's not at all clear how participants were recruited. I contacted Merlin to ask, but haven't heard back from them as yet.
Obviously, the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament is specific to the Church of England as the Established Church and in that sense Anglicanism's unique legal status in England can be seen, but the Methodist Church of Great Britain operates within the framework of a Private Act of Parliament, namely the 1976 Methodist Church Act.
Thanks David, was not aware of this! Will have to read up on Methodism a bit more. Do you know why parliament had to legislate for the church?
“Even if you sympathise with those Christians outraged by ICE (and pastors working with ICE), they are not going to win any more converts to their cause by angrily shouting in the faces of ordinary Americans in the pews who’ve come to church to worship God. It’s just bad politics, as well as unkind.”
the moral cowardice in this paragraph is appalling. shame on you.
There is, of course, value in prophetically standing up to challenge injustice or in solidarity with the suffering even when you know it is unlikely to alter events. But the person these protesters sought to challenge wasn't even in the room, they were instead getting in the faces of people who have absolutely nothing to do with ICE. If you actually want to protect vulnerable migrants and minorities, rather than performatively gain online clout, there are a million more direct and effective protest strategies, rather than aggressively disrupting the worship of innocent and unrelated Americans.
On the Tail that wags the dog, to allege that the Ecclesiastical Committee is repeatedly interfering when it has only done so twice since 2002 somewhat undermines the credibility of the attack.
On the Clergy Conduct Measure, the original proposal quite clearly was in breach of Article 6 of the ECHR and the Human Rights Act. The victims of abuse and the press are entitled to be present at a tribunal subject to restraints and arrangements to protect vulnerable witnesses. Open hearings are required in the Crown Court and the Family Court, as the Chair of the Ecclesiastical Committee, a former president of the Family Division, pointed out. As long as the Courts Ecclesiastical are English courts the CCM as drafted would have exposed the Church of England to the risk of being castigated in Strasbourg for denying the right of a victim.
On the Governance Measure, this originated in a report by Sir David Lidington. Although Sir David had been told that he was not to consider safeguarding (something most of us would consider of great relevance to governance) he ignored the instruction and included a specific point that there had to be an independent body to scrutinise safeguarding. The Governance measure contained no such provision and its clauses relating to the use of Church Commissioner moneys would make it impossible for the Commissioners to fund such a body directly. A body dependent on the benevolence of the apparatchiks in Church House for its operating budget is clearly not independent. The Ecclesiastical Committee was quite right to take a firm line.
Lastly, on other religious bodies, Parliament can if it wishes legislate. Indeed it is doing so at present - The Crime and Policing Bill currently in Committee in the Lords will impose penalties on religious bodies which fail to report abuse. Also any religious institution which is a charity is regulated by the Charity Commission can be told what it must do to maintain its charitable status.
If the committee had continued to stay in its box and nod synodical legislation through as it normally does than I would agree that the still disagreeable arrangement by which parliament gets to scrutinise the church's internal affairs would be tolerable. I'm not claiming parliament has a history of this, which is why the situation has remained unchallenged so long. But it's because all of a sudden this committee has begun to repeatedly interfere that the process, in my view, has become a problem.
If private hearings by default are such an egregious breach of human rights legislation (let's pause for a moment to acknowledge the irony of right-wing Conservative MPs who despise the ECHR and Human Rights Act and would love to abolish both, suddenly developing a deep affection for their provisions), then why did the CDM which had exactly the same process a) be allowed to exist for over 20 years with no hint of a Strasbourg challenge, and b) raise no qualms from these very same constitutional experts on the committee?
As repeatedly explained to the committee, the safeguarding independence arrangements are being legislated for separately from the governance reforms, which have been designed so to seamlessly adjust to the new safeguarding arrangements when they can be put in place. It is putting the cart before the horses to hold up the governance changes while we wait up to three more years for the independent safeguarding body to be introduced. Governance is not safeguarding, they are separate issues. The Church Commissioners point over accountability and money has also been repeatedly clarified and debunked for the committee (including by the commissioners themselves), to sadly to no avail.
Of course parliament can legislate for religious bodies when it comes to individual issues such as safeguarding or charitable status, but this is to ensure religious organisations are not above the law but accountable to exactly the same standards as any other private charitable organisation. The problem is not when parliament decide to impose a nationwide standard or requirement on the church (along with every other comparable institution) for the public benefit, but when it decides to compel the church alone to change its internal affairs because it believes it knows better than the church how it should be governed.
On your point about the CDM having a similar provision to the original draft CCM, but going unchallenged, there have been very few cases determined under the CDM (around 20 between 2020 and 2025). The defendant/respondent clergy cannot challenge because they have not asked for a public hearing. The rationale for the CCM is that it make it easier to bring cases. The provisions of the CCM remove episcopal discretion and hand decision to lawyers. So more cases can be expected. Further following Smyth/Makin we now have clear examples where victims may want open hearings.
So far no tribunal has been reported as deciding on an open hearing in a Makin/Smyth case but the President of Tribunals has taken to requiring (subject to the defendant's agreement) the Church to publish his reasoned decisions to dismiss cases. If a case does reach a tribunal - and owing to the secrecy of the NST we do not know if any have got that far - we may find either a victim or a media organisation challenging a hearing held in private under the CDM rule.
Both the abuse scandals and the increasingly bitter LLF controversy makes it likely that there will be protest over private hearings at some point. As long as the Tribunals (Courts Ecclesiastical) are part of the English legal system, and as long as the UK remains in the ECHR, Article 6 of the Convention applies. It would be folly to allow a provision that invites a reference to Strasbourg to be enacted. One wonders whether the Law Officers would not advise the government to oppose a Measure that so clearly was incompatible with Article 5 when it came to a Parliamentary vote.
Your comment on right wing Conservative MPs is unworthy of you. Concern about secret hearings was voiced by Marsh de Cordova (Labour) and Al Pinkerton (LibDem) and by the apolitical chair based on her experience as a leading judge.