Did the Church Commissioners get their sums right on reparations?
Charles Moore asks in his Telegraph column whether the Church Commissioners have got their sums right on reparations (‘Is the Church paying reparations on a false premise?, 23 April 2024).
He argues that the original historical audit found that Queen Anne’s Bounty (the predecessor fund of the Church Commissioners) had invested the rough equivalent of £440 million today in the slave trade, via the South Sea Company for some 20 years (1720-1740).
This has been challenged recently by Professor Richard Dale, who says that the Church Commissioners report is not peer reviewed and conducting his own peer review via Charles Moore, argues that there are some oversights. In 1723 – three years after the South Sea Bubble had burst, Parliament split the South Sea Company in two. Queen Anne’s Bounty hedged their bets and invested in the annuities side of the business, which ring-fenced the fund from trading. Consequently the Bounty invested only about £14,000 (about £2.4 million today) in the chattel slave trade.
At the very least, the Church Commissioners should wrestle with this new information and reflect upon it in a new light. Many parishioners in the C of E continue to have doubts about a fund which seems to be about far more than massive numbers and rather less about the practicalities of how funds, which are specifically intended for the ministry of the Church of England and its clergy, can be spent outside these objectives.
Moore compares this with the way that the hierarchy of the C of E unanimously accused Bishop George Bell of child abuse from some 60 years earlier without any of the due diligence that should be expected.
He writes: “The claim the hierarchy now makes about Queen Anne’s Bounty seems similarly unfair and motivate, as was theBell case, more by a desire to look good than by a zeal for truth. You might call it moral Bounty-hunting.”
Church of England Newspaper Editor’s Comment April 25
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