There are so many reasons why the idea of reparations for slavery is wrong.
You can’t define who should receive or who should pay. The UK of 2026 is a totally different country from that of 1833 (at the abolition of slavery in the British Empire). Many UK taxpayers are the descendants of slaves, or came from places affected in West Africa. There would be no justice in who paid. The vast majority of Britons have no connection to slavers’ profits – and nor did their ancestors.
Nor would there be justice in who received. There is no straight line between victims of those times and their descendants. Too much time has passed.
And how much to pay? While I was still Archbishop, on an official visit to the wonderful island of Jamaica, during a panel debate on radio I was seriously told that the right amount was $21 trillion. I pointed out that was far more than the total wealth of the UK.
Ordinary people from all backgrounds and ethnicities are suffering here at home today. Reparations would amount to a vast fine on the entire British people for a crime they did not commit. You may be able to fine individual people for their conduct, but not everyone for their nationality. Group punishment is a moral evil. It mixes up the guilty and the innocent even when it is about contemporary times, let alone two centuries past.
And what about those sailors of the Royal Navy who died liberating the slaves, or the UK Parliamentarians who spent their lives campaigning for the abolition of slavery and its trade? Should their descendants be treated differently?
One of those they freed was a young man, Ajayi, captured by African slave traders aged 12 in what is today Nigeria, and sold to the Portuguese to be transported across the Atlantic. He was freed by the Royal Navy. Ajayi used his freedom to settle in England, where he adopted the name of Samuel Crowther. A brilliant and deeply religious man, in 1864 he was ordained the first African bishop by one of my predecessors as Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles Longley, and went on to meet Queen Victoria. Tragically, although he was the greatest person of his day in proclaiming the good news of Christ to Africa, most of his white missionary colleagues would not accept him, and he died in despair.
This just goes to show that addressing the historic evil of slavery is a complex issue and requires thoughtful solutions. Reparations are not the way to do it. It would create more problems than it would solve and would be addressing one injustice by creating another.
The Church Commissioners (the charity which holds the historic funds of the Church since 1703) deliberately did not propose reparations although they know that they benefited enormously, if generally indirectly, from 18th-century slave money. So they proposed that over 10 years a sum of £100m (well under 1 per cent of the total funds held for the church) would be set aside at £10m a year (under a thousandth of total funds) in a perpetual endowment to be used for impact investment in improving the future for those regions affected by slavery and suffering the consequences. Not reparations – essentially a variety of venture capital.
You can’t repair a brutal past, but you can share in building a better future. And the past was indescribably brutal. We know the stories and they even shocked people of the 18th century. The treatment of slaves in slave ships, and of slaves on plantations, is much the same as the treatment of prisoners in Auschwitz. And it came from the same basic sin. They were considered not to be human
The bible talks very little of reparation, but it talks a lot about repentance. Repentance means recognising wrong, turning round and going towards what is right. Dismissing other people as not human is as wrong as it gets, because you have no conscience about how you behave. So let’s do right instead. Let us all benefit from good and fair trade deals with the Caribbean and West Africa. Let’s reclaim our global tradition and deploy our trade and innovation brilliance in partnership with that of the countries who suffered from slavery as we tackle global warming and the effects of climate change. As it happens, they are amongst the worst affected.
Nothing at all can remove the stain on our history of what was done to so many people taken as chattel slaves. We must recognise that evil. It still exists in various forms. But to do even the right thing in the wrong way makes for more evil. It is right to act differently, wrong to act foolishly. Investment in new technologies and solving current existential dangers in partnership will build more wealth than a futile and unjust payment of fake “reparations” ever could. And the way we did it would demonstrate that we have repented of the racism of slavery, and, with due humility and great courage, will change their lives and ours together.
