by Tim Wyatt, The Critical Friend
Project Spire is back among the headlines again. This is the hyper-controversial Church of England plans we’ve discussed several times in the past. The basic proposal is to peel off £100m from the Church Commissioners (who manage the C of E’s endowment fund) to be invested into a special fund targeted at black-led initiatives and businesses, in an effort to make recompense for the historic investments made by the Commissioners’ predecessor fund in the slave trade.
Amusingly, we got two takes on Spire published the same day last week. One was reported through the viewpoint of those rallying to block the project, while the other was presented as an expose of the dark forces trying to kill off Spire. One was published by The Times, and the other by The Guardian — see if you can guess which was which!
The Times reported on Jamie Franklin, a vicar in Winchester, and Bijan Omrani, a barrister and churchwarden in Devon, who are spearheading a legal challenge against the Commissioners. The basic argument is that the Commissioners’ charitable objects prevent them from transferring the £100m to a new charity due to be set up to administer the fund, to be called the Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice. Franklin and Omrani have asked the regulator, the Charity Commission to get a High Court order barring the Commissioners (who are a registered charity) from being able to give the £100m away, on the grounds their charitable objects compel them only to spend their money ‘promoting the mission and ministry of the Church of England’.
The Commissioners, for their part, concede that a new charity is required (if nothing else because they want to make investments overseas and they are constrained to working in England) but insist they are working with the regulator to figure out the right legal mechanism to allow them to transfer over to this new body the £100m seed capital.
But Omrani and Franklin’s objections clearly lie well beyond the minutiae of charity regulation, which appears to be simply the method they have chosen to try to kill off Project Spire. Omrani told The Times it was unconscionable for the church to be frittering away such huge sums of money on dubious reparations schemes when ordinary parish churches were struggling to hire vicars and keep the lights on. Franklin added that Spire gave the wrong impression about the church’s history: in fact, he said, the C of E had a “very positive record in terms of [supporting] the abolition of slavery”.