This money would come out of the investments maintained by the Church of England which are supposed to support poorer parishes.
Diverting these resources away from parishes would, indeed, require an Act of Parliament.
The historical justification for this proposed scheme depends on a study commissioned by the Church of England itself, whose conclusions have been fiercely contested, notably by Professor Nigel Biggar. I am not going to explore the details of this dispute, not least because their importance is surprisingly unclear.
On social media, a common response to Professor Biggar’s arguments seems to be that it does not really matter if, for example, a brief investment by Queen Anne’s Bounty in the South Sea Company was profitable.
Rather, the response continues, the very fact that the Church of England existed in the years before Britain abolished slavery in 1833 means that it is tainted and needs to make amends, because the entire British economy benefitted from slavery. The fact that the entire British economy also paid the price of ending slavery does not, apparently, have the same salience.
I am reminded of an incident in the now-defunct Oxford Hall where I was a Fellow, St Benet’s.
Some undergraduates demanded that we look into the historical connections we had with slavery, with a view to making some kind of recompense. A colleague of mine explained to them that not only did the Hall not exist when slavery was abolished, but that the English Benedictines, who founded it, were far too impecunious to have any such investments.
The students, to do them credit, accepted this.
But they were not relieved.
They were disappointed.
The reality is that beating one’s breast about one’s privilege, whether this supposedly derives from one’s gender, skin colour, or some equally inescapable historical circumstance, has become a way of signalling elite status. This is the central argument of a recent book, We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi, and although he does not address the present case, he sets out a number of ways we can tell that this is what is going on.
Most obviously, and counter-intuitively, in the elite circles where woke ideology has made its home, acknowledging one’s privilege does not lower one’s perceived prestige.
On the contrary, it is those people from supposedly privileged groups who refuse to acknowledge their privilege whose status is lowered, on the basis that they are in denial. Furthermore, having made the acknowledgement, no costly action is required to restore justice. You are expected to make the acknowledgement, and then to carry on as before.
Does the case of the slavery reparations proposed by the Church of England follow this pattern? At first glance, taking £100 million out of a fund to assist parishes might seem very costly indeed. On closer examination, however, this is less clear.
The money is not going to be handed over to descendants of slaves, or to institutions such as the historically black colleges in the United States that were created to help the descendants of slaves, or to charities working in those Caribbean countries which were formed specifically by the British slave trade. £100 million would endow a great many schools and hospitals in Jamaica, one might think.
No: the plan is for it to constitute a new fund, which will remain under the control of the Church Commissioners, to invest in profit-seeking enterprises which claim to help communities affected by slavery, make grants to charities out of its income, and fund yet more historical research.
In other words, far from losing any influence or prestige, the Church Commissioners will be freed to use a large portion of their funds not on boring things like saving historic church roofs from the death-watch beetle, but on the kind of risky investments normally barred to trustees, and on all sorts of patronage. The justifications for junkets to the tropics positively write themselves.
The parishes which will lose out on this scheme, on the other hand, are clearly low down on their list of priorities. Why should anyone care about them?
In some ways, the slavery reparations scheme is a particularly extreme form of virtue-signalling.
Those who admit, tearfully, to being white, note the lower-case ‘w’, are at least admitting something supposedly shameful about themselves.
The Anglican prelates who acknowledge their Church’s supposed historical involvement in the slave trade are making a claim not about their own guilt, but about that of long-dead predecessors. If acknowledging one’s own guilt can be rendered painless among the woke elite, acknowledging other people’s guilt is positively pleasurable.
Things are quite different with guilt that comes closer to home. It has been instructive to note the contrasting attitudes among Anglican leaders to senior prelates accused of complicity in child sexual abuse when they are safely long dead, such as Bishop George Bell of Chichester, and when they are inconveniently still alive, such as Archbishop Justin Welby.
The former was condemned on what turned out to be very flimsy evidence by the very same people who found it so difficult to see why Welby should resign, including the Archbishop himself.
In using these examples, I intend no unfavourable comparison with the Catholic Church, whose own record on abuse allegations has been deplorable.
I mention it only because it provides a particularly clear example of the problem.
Is it a coincidence that Archbishop Welby should leap to condemn Bishop Bell while he was himself sitting on the powder keg of his association with the prolific abuser John Smyth?
Or was it, rather, a conscious or unconscious way of shoring up his own virtue? And is something along these lines going on with the slavery reparations proposal, on a larger scale?
I cannot answer those questions.
Nevertheless, when we are invited to condemn people from the distant past, we would do well to ask whether more recent victims of injustice have been given the consideration that they deserve.