Lord Sewell: Church slavery fund is just for show
By Alice Thomson, James Beal, The Times:
The Church of England’s £1 billion slavery reparation fund is “almost like bribery”, the government’s former race tsar said, as he said that Britain was much less racist than 40 years ago.
Lord Sewell of Sanderstead, who was chairman of Boris Johnson’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, claimed that the church had made a “political” decision to start the fund and was doing it “for show”.
In January last year the Church of England announced a £100 million fund to give grants to and invest in projects to benefit black communities after a report found that a significant proportion of the church’s wealth of £10.3 billion could be traced to investments in the 18th-century slave trade.
An independent panel set up to design the fund said in a report last month that £100 million would be insufficient to address the enduring harms from enslavement. It recommended that the church should seek outside contributions from wealthy families and pension or sovereign wealth funds to boost the value to £1 billion.
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