The trouble with the Church of England’s ‘reparations’ project (‘Spire’)

In February this year, Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert spoke at a fringe meeting at the General Synod. The meeting raised historical, legal, social and ethical objections to Project Spire – a project to divert £100million from an endowment intended to support local parishes into catalytic investment schemes (that is, high-risk investment intended to attract other investors) to benefit black people who are assumed to be still suffering from the effects of Transatlantic chattel slavery.

In deciding to pay reparations, the Church Commission (a charity responsible for the Church of England’s administration) is taking money from people today who had nothing to do with slavery and giving it to people who also had nothing to do with slavery either, but who have the skin colour associated with victimhood and disadvantage, irrespective of reality.

The other speakers were:

Nigel Biggar, former Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, and other of numerous books, including Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023) and Reparations: The Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (2025).

Richard Dale, emeritus professor at the University of Southampton and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His books include The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Charles Wide, a retired Old Bailey judge and a reader in his Anglican Church in Peterborough Diocese.

You can read and watch the introductions here and watch the discussion in the videos below.