Should the CofE offer financial redress for its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade?

Who is proposing compensation?
The Church of England itself. The Church's interest in the issue dates back many years. In 2006, it apologised for the role that clergymen had played in the transatlantic slave trade. In 2019, the Audit and Risk Committee of the Church Commissioners (the body that administers its assets) raised questions about possible reputational damage arising from its past links to slavery, and commissioned a report by historians and forensic accountants.

This, published in 2023, found that the Church had received funds linked to African enslavement worth as much as £1 billion in today's money. The Church Commissioners responded by setting aside £100 million, about 10% of its total endowment, to "address past wrongs". An oversight committee was also appointed to examine how to spend the money. In March this year, it recommended that the Church raise up to £1 billion for a new fund. The £100 million set aside was "not enough", it said.

What were these 'past wrongs'?
The most significant is an investment scheme called Queen Anne's Bounty. It was set up in 1704, when certain ecclesiastical taxes that had previously been paid to the Crown were diverted to supplement the income of poor clergy. Funds received were invested in the South Sea Company, a government venture that had a monopoly on the trade of enslaved Africans to the Spanish-held colonies in the Americas. Between 1715 and 1739, the South Sea Company transported 34,000 enslaved people over the course of at least 96 transatlantic voyages; it also transported slaves from Caribbean islands to Spanish-held ports in mainland America. By 1739, when the South Sea Company stopped engaging in slave trading, the scheme had accumulated investments in it worth £204,000, or £443 million in today's terms. Money from that fund flowed into a larger fund that is currently worth £10.3 billion.

Were there other links to slavery?
Many. The fund also received cash and land donations from people with links to slave labour, including Edward Colston, the merchant and slave trader whose statue was toppled by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol in 2020. That same year, a database held by University College London found that 96 CofE clergymen had sought compensation paid to slave owners when the trade was abolished in the British empire in 1833. The Church received nearly £9,000, an estimated £900,000 in today's money, for the loss of slave labour on its Codrington Plantations in Barbados (these were owned by its missionary organisation, The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and slaves were branded across the chest with the word "Society"). The Bishop of Exeter and his business associates received even more in compensation.

How would the money be used?
The Church has not yet decided how to allocate the £100 million it has so far committed to, but the bulk of the money is expected to be used to establish a new "social impact investment fund". This fund would give grants aimed at supporting Black-led businesses and Black entrepreneurs who find it harder to access capital. The Church said that the fund would enable grants to be made available for projects focused on "improving opportunities" for communities affected by the slave trade, and help pay for further research into the history of slavery. It would also be used to ensure that "best practice" can be shared with other organisations seeking to reconcile their historic links to slavery.

Are these plans controversial?
Very. The reparations movement has long attracted criticism in the US. A welter of objections has been raised, both practical and on grounds of principle: that everyone directly involved in slavery, both beneficiaries and victims, is long dead; that it is unfair to penalise people today for the wrongs of their ancestors; that loss and benefit are impossible to calculate at such historic distance; that in any case choosing people to compensate is an impossible task. In the specific case of the Church of England, it has been pointed out that, as well as profiting from the slave trade, the Church played a vital role in ending it. William Wilberforce was moved by his Anglican faith to lead the abolition movement. As Saint Paul put it in Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

How does the Church of England defend these plans?
In his Easter sermon last year, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby defended the fund, which he described as not an expression of "wokery" or "postcolonial guilt", but of Christian values and Christian love. A recent report from the Church's Anti-Racism Taskforce stated that there was a clear theological case for the "reconciliation" and "redemption", and a practical one too. It noted that the CofE's "contested heritage is at odds with the Christian mission and the Church's desire to reach diverse nationalities"; more than half of the worldwide Anglican communion is now based in Africa. It does not use the term "reparations", because the scheme will not offer compensation to individuals.

What will happen next?
The Church welcomed the report by the Commissioners in March, but has not committed to raising the existing fund to £1 billion, and the £100 million fund promised a year ago is still not operational; channelling money to effect social change is not an easy task. And arguably it needs money to discharge its primary function; Church of England attendance has fallen by half in the past 40 years, and by a fifth since the start of the pandemic. "After decades of telling us there is no money to fund churches and ministers who keep the Church alive on the front line, suddenly they have found £100 million behind the back of the sofa," complained Rev'd Marcus Walker of the group Save the Parish.

The reparations movement
The question of reparations for slavery has rumbled on in the US since the Civil War, when General Sherman ordered that freed slaves should be given plots of land ("40 acres and a mule"). In all but a handful of cases, they did not get it. The debate was revived by African American radicals such as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers in the 1960s, and again by activists in the past decade. A 2014 essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic argued that only reparations could ameliorate profound racial inequalities, rooted not just in slavery and the South's Jim Crow laws, but in systematic legal discrimination which, for instance, made it difficult for Black families to take out mortgages as late as the 1970s. The movement was then turbocharged by the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and the global protests that followed. Cities including Los Angeles and New York are contemplating reparations; in Evanston, Illinois, payments have already begun, in the form of vouchers for housing and mortgages.

In the UK last year, Lloyd's of London pledged £40 million to development projects, in recognition of its slavery links, while The Guardian apologised after discovering it was founded with the profits of slave-picked cotton, and set up a £10 million "restorative justice" fund.

"Just one week ago, hope looked fanciful," said The Economist. Since October last year, President Biden's proposal to spend $61 billion on aid for Ukraine (and smaller amounts for Israel and Taiwan) had "languished in congress".
The military consequences for Ukraine, which is facing desperate shortages of artillery ammunition and air defence missiles, were dire. The CIA director William Burns warned last month of "a very real risk that the Ukrainians could lose on the battlefield by the end of 2024".

But opposition to further US support from the isolationist wing of the Republican Party seemed insuperable. The new Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is himself a sceptic on Ukraine, and colleagues on the right of his party had threatened to unseat him if he tabled the bill. Yet last Saturday, under Johnson's leadership, the House "met the moment", passing the bill through extraordinary parliamentary manoeuvring: a majority of his own party voted against additional aid, but the Democrats were unanimous in support. As a result, $61 billion of aid is on the way to Ukraine. "It should have an almost instant effect."

Pentagon officials have indicated that US artillery shells stockpiled in Europe could be shipped to Ukraine within weeks, said Diane Francis in The Kyiv Post. With US missile systems likely to arrive before the expected Russian offensive in early summer, Ukraine's eastern front should soon be stabilised. And Europe's governments and military industries are now finally mobilising in support; F-16 jets are expected in June.

Russia's campaign has suffered a severe setback, said Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. This aid package alone won't turn the tide. But "suddenly the Russian military and Russian society are once again faced with the prospect of a very long war".

For many ordinary Ukrainians, "the aid is too little, too late", said Owen Matthews in The Spectator. In the past few months, they have lost lives, land and infrastructure because of Western dithering. They know "that their security is dependent on the political whims of their allies and could once again evaporate": Donald Trump could be elected in November, and has claimed that he would end the war in "one day".

The vote was "historic", said The Washington Post. But it was more "an inflection point than a conclusion". The rise of a "selfish, simplistic America First ideology" in the Republican Party puts Europe's security "at risk".
US support for Ukraine is guaranteed for the next few months."Beyond that, the outlook is cloudier."

Rebecca Hall comes from an artistic family: her mother was the opera singer Maria Ewing; her father the theatre director Peter Hall. And in the early part of her acting career, she set her sights on "interesting" work, and scolded her agent for trying to get her parts in popcorn movies. "I wrote a letter to my agent at the time saying, 'I'm not a conventional movie star, and how dare you.' I mean, I was probably nicer than that. I'm more polite. But the gist of it was: 'I wish for you to conceive of me as something other than what you're conceiving me.'"

Her younger self would be appalled by her new film – the monster movie "Godzilla vs. Kong", said Thessaly La Force in The New York Times. But Hall has come to see that her younger self was wrong.

"As cool and righteous as it was, I think it was an error. The more of those big jobs that I would've done in my 20s, the more access I would've had to other work. It was also incredibly arrogant to assume that all those films were unworthy… I didn't know what I was talking about."