Church of England Commissioners want to donate £100million towards slavery reparations. Which will raise a few eyebrows or worse when the collection plate goes round at Sunday morning service.
The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, has indicated that she supports the move, infuriating some MPs who say the money would be better spent fixing falling-down churches.
This sparked a fascinating debate when Martin Daubney was standing in for Nigel Farage on his GB News show over the question: how far back in history is too far for taking responsibility for atrocious behaviour?
Former Attorney General Sir Michael Ellis said: “Profiting from slavery is abhorrent. But if Britain had dues to pay, those debts are settled.”
That seems about right. If no time limit is put on past horrors, we would be compensating Jews for the property stolen from them by Edward I when he expelled them from England in 1290, or paying a hefty sum to the Vatican for all the Roman Catholic churches Anglicans snaffled when Henry VIII's Reformation nationalised the Church in England to turn it into the Church of England.
Former Cabinet minister and devout Catholic Jacob Rees-Mogg suggested that would mean Westminster belonging to Rome, including the GB News studio a stone's throw from Parliament, where we were sitting, and his own home, two stone throws away.
Michael argued that Britain has a proud record in combating slavery. We were second only to Denmark in abolishing the trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833.
The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron lost 2,000 men fighting the slave trade and rescued some 150,000 captured Africans, which is an impressive feat.
In 1833, Britain paid £20million in compensation to stop slavery, which would be worth around £17billion today. This is not something of which we can be quite so proud.
The Church of England must not pay compensation for slavery. This is why - Nigel Nelson
|Getty Images
The money went to the slave owners to compensate them for their lost ‘property’. The slaves didn’t get a penny.
The family of Victorian PM William Gladstone was handed the equivalent of millions of pounds, and the total paid out was worth 40 per cent of the Treasury’s entire income at the time.
This debt was not settled by taxpayers until 2015, which prompted Martin to say that the people who really should be compensated are the British working class, who picked up the tab.
By contrast, upper crust families which had become rich on the back of slavery became even richer thanks to the compo. And many of those families still are. But 100 of them feel a sense of guilt and want to atone for the past.
Gladstone’s descendants have given £100,000 to Guyana, while former BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan donated the same amount to Grenada in recompense for the six sugar plantations her family once owned.
But this is a drop in the Caribbean Sea compared to what the nations there say they want in reparations from the UK – a mind-blowing £18trillion which is a ridiculous sum.
To put that into perspective, the Government’s annual expenditure is only £1.2trillion. My view is that, as a rule of thumb, compensation should only be given for events within the living memory of victims or close relatives who might also be directly affected.
Such as the £11.8billion set aside for those caught up in the infected blood scandal and the £1billion paid out to postmasters wrongly accused of stealing. History is littered with grievances. And history books are where they should stay.
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