So-Called 'Slavery Reparations' Are A Bad Joke.

Church of England's justification for slavery reparations is 'a complete joke', says MP.

 (Photo: Getty/iStock)

Katie Lam MP has challenged controversial plans in the Church of England to set up a £100m investment fund to address historic links to transatlantic slavery. 

She claimed that Project Spire, and its proposed Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice, is "illegal" and called the plans "disastrous", arguing that the money should instead be spent on struggling parishes. 

Project Spire was launched in 2023 after research commissioned by the Church concluded that the Queen Anne’s Bounty, a predecessor endowment fund of the Church Commissioners, had links to transatlantic chattel slavery through investments and benefactions.

Lam, the Conservative MP for Weald of Kent, said the justification for the project was "a complete joke" and that diverting funds away from struggling parishes was "absurd". 

"The Church of England is planning to give away £100m in slavery reparations and their justification is a complete joke," she said in a video posted on X.

"Apparently they're required to do so because a fund established by Queen Anne in 1704 had invested in a company involved in the West African slave trade. 

"The problem is that it turns out that the supposed link between the Church and slavery is fake. 

"The original report seems to have confused South Sea Securities, which would have been money invested in the slave trade, with South Sea Annuities, which is just money that was lent to the British government. 

"There is no evidence that the Church of England made any money at all from the slave trade in this way. And even so, this idea that we are uniquely guilty for historic slavery and therefore to pay reparations is totally wrong. 

"Almost every society in the world participated in slavery at some point in its history. The unique thing about Britain is the fact that we spent so much time and money on trying to end the slave trade.

"We were only the second country in the world to decide to do so and we spent a huge amount of money, political capital, and ultimately the lives of navy sailors doing it. 

"And if that weren't bad enough, to fund all of this, the Church is using a charitable fund that is supposed to be used on maintaining local parish churches. That is illegal." 

She added, "The idea that the Church of England should now, hundreds of years later, pay £100m in slavery reparations, while so many parish churches are literally crumbling is absurd."

Jamie Franklin, priest in charge at Holy Trinity Winchester and host of the Irreverend podcast, agreed with Lam, calling her comments "a very good, concise summary of the principal reasons why Project Spire is such a complete scandal".

"The Church Commissioners should be using far more of the £11.8 billion fund at their disposal to fund parish ministry, not engaging in illegal acts of virtue-signalling," he said. 

Lam was one of 24 Conservative MPs, together with four members of the House of Lords, who wrote to Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, late last year calling for a re-think. 

In the letter, they said the project was based "on highly contested interpretations of history” and that the Church Commissioners’ endowment must be used instead to support parish ministry and the maintenance of church buildings, as well as the Church’s historic records. 

"At a moment when churches across the country are struggling to keep their doors open - many even falling into disrepair - it’s wrong to try and justify diverting £100 million to a project entirely separate from those core obligations," the letter read.

The Church of England's July meeting of the General Synod confirmed that over £1.15m has already been spent on Project Spire. 

The Bishop of Norwich, Graham Usher, said the expense had come from "proportionate research into the Commissioners’ historical sources of funds and consideration of appropriate responses, including necessary legal advice and stakeholder engagement".

The Church of England has denied that the fund is illegal, with Bishop Usher saying, "The Commissioners ensure that expenditure is applied only within their charitable purposes and powers." 

He confirmed, though, that the project has been held up due to a legal challenge which has prevented the Church from being able to register the Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice with the Charity Commission. No details were given about the party taking legal action against it. 

Recent polling suggested strong opposition to Project Spire among churchgoers, with 81 per cent of respondents saying the fund should be used to support local parishes, and 61 per cent saying they may cease providing financial support to the Church of England altogether if the plans go ahead. 

The Church has doubled down on the project, with Bishop Usher insisting it has "not been abandoned". 

"We continue to be outraged by our historic links to African chattel enslavement and our part in the responsibility for the enduring legacies of this abhorrent past that continue to affect the lives of people today," he said in answers to Synod questions. CT.

Power To The Faint.

 

Islamic Kindness To Christians? - Is This True? - Perhaps We Need To Know.

How kind has Islam been to Christians?

A depiction of Archangel Gabriel inside the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, which was a church for hundreds of years before being turned into a mosque. (Photo: Getty/iStock)

Recently, a handful of popular podcasters have claimed that Islamic regimes are historically “very kind” toward Christians. Those who make this claim are either willfully ignorant or are advancing an agenda. The historical record is not ambiguous. 

For example, the claims that relations between Islam and the Christian world were peaceful for 500 years until the First Crusade are false. Mohammad died in 632. By 732, Islam had taken the Holy Land and North Africa from the Christian Byzantine Empire. It had also conquered Spain and advanced into France a few hundred miles from Paris.  

After taking additional land in southern France and establishing bases in the Alps, Muslims launched raids into Germany. They also sacked the outskirts of Rome and took control of Sicily. In 1071, they defeated the Byzantines and took control of most of modern Turkey. Twenty-four years later, the Byzantine Emperor asked the Pope for help, leading to the First Crusade. 

Christians in these conquered territories were treated as dhimmis, second-class citizens who were required to pay the jizya, a special tax and sign of submission that was often accompanied by ritual humiliations. Failure to pay the tax could result in death, enslavement, and the destruction of the local church building.  

No public displays of Christianity were allowed, including the ringing of church bells or even praying aloud in one’s own home within earshot of a Muslim. No new churches could be built, and no old churches could be repaired without permission, which was rarely given. Criticism of Islam and evangelizing Muslims was strictly forbidden. In court, a Christian’s testimony was worth less than a Muslim’s. Christians could not have authority over a Muslim or have a house taller than a Muslim’s. They could not bear arms or ride a horse. At times, they were forced to wear distinctive clothing.  

Another claim is that Muslim rulers protected Christian holy sites and repaired them when damaged. Again, nothing could be further from the truth. Typically, important Christian holy sites were converted to mosques to show the victory of Islam. The most prominent example is Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the largest church in Christendom for 1000 years. When the city fell to the Turks, it and other churches were desecrated and converted to mosques. 

An exception was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, perhaps because it was a major pilgrimage site that generated revenue for the Caliph. However, in 1009, Caliph Al Hakim destroyed it. It lay in ruins for decades until his successor allowed the Byzantines to rebuild it, likely to again collect pilgrimage revenues. 800 years later, the church was severely damaged in a fire. Local Christians blamed Muslims, but the official story is that it was caused by a candle or oil lamp. The Ottomans allowed it to be repaired using Christian funds donated from overseas. They did not pay for the repair. 

In the Ottoman Empire, that some claim was kind to Christians, boys were taken from Christian homes to be raised as Janissaries, or Muslim slave-soldiers who were taught to despise their Christian families. Girls were often taken as slaves into harems, and violence often broke out against Christian communities in Ottoman territories. The worst violence was the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides of the early twentieth century, in which between 1.5 million and 2.5 million people were killed by the Ottoman government. 

The same violence against Christians continues today, with abductions, forced marriages, murders, arson of churches, and oppression of Christians in places like Pakistan and Egypt, and increasingly in Europe. There is a prohibition of churches in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries and, of course, the ongoing slaughter of Christians by Islamists in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa. 

So no, Islam has not been kind to Christians. The only reason to make this claim is to make the occasional anti-Christian acts of Israelis look worse. But there is no comparison. Christians in Israel have more rights and freedoms than in any Muslim country, especially in history. To claim otherwise is to ignore reality. 

© The Colson Center for Christian Worldview 2026

Butterfly.

 

A SUPERB Question That The CofE MUST Answer!

 Can you Save the Parish while sidelining Scripture?

 (Photo: Getty/iStock)

If Save the Parish is going to do what it says on the tin, how can it treat the Church of England’s traditional teaching on marriage and sexual morality as a secondary issue?

Save the Parish (StP), founded in 2021 “to sustain a thriving, cradle to grave, parish system with well-trained clergy”, has just launched its manifesto for the elections this autumn to the C of E’s governing body, the General Synod. 

CT.

Jail Sentences Reduced To Just 40%?

 70,000 released since Labour took power including murderers and rapists.

As a former JP, I have seen what happens. Very, very few criminals are ever imprisoned.

For years, terrible offenders have escaped 1/3 of their pathetically light sentences as the norm.

Criminals have precious little to fear from the courts. We have much to fear from criminals.

The Tragic Israel Wedge.

 The tragic Israel wedge.

Jewish leaders need to quickly close the ignorant gap between Zionism and Judaism

Melanie Phillips Jul 31

Rabbi Angela Buchdahl warning against then New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, November 2025

Israel has not just become a pathologically unhinged obsession in the Western world. It’s also turning into a wedge issue that’s splitting diaspora Jews from each other.

Last week, New York City’s Islamist mayor Zohran Mamdani broadcast a video packed with eye-watering lies painting Israelis as cruel and bloodthirsty genocidal monsters determined to kill and starve innocents in Gaza.

The purpose of this two-minute hate was to signal that it was now open season against Zionism and the Jews of the city, for whom the price of acceptance is to be the institutionalised demonisation of Israel to further Mamdani’s driving aim of the destruction of the Jewish state.

The full implications of this strategy were well understood by Angela Buchdahl, the Reform rabbi of Manhattan’s Central synagogue. In a strong open letter to the mayor, she wrote that he had used “rhetoric that demonises Jews and the Jewish state” and had therefore put “a bullseye on our backs”.

But Mamdani is also taking more direct aim at his city’s Jewish community.

Earlier this week, he appointed an 18-member advisory committee on the judiciary without a single Jewish attorney, former judge, or legal professional— this in a city where Jews make up approximately half of all its lawyers.

The message was unmistakable. The mayor is simply trying to erase civic involvement by the city’s Jews.

Mamdani’s broader aim is to transform America’s most important city into an Islam-compliant welfare dependency with no potential challenge to his power base.

Islamists believe that Jewish power is their principal obstacle to conquering the West. With New York containing the largest Jewish population in the world outside Israel, Mamdani is setting out to neutralise the Jews through discrimination and an atmosphere that incites harassment, intimidation and violence against them.

Appallingly, more than 30 per cent of the city’s Jews voted Mamdani into office. Other Jewish New Yorkers understood from the get-go that he was hostile to Israel, although even then many of them didn’t fully appreciate just how monomaniacal he is in his hatred of Israel and the Jewish people.

Some liberal Jews still refuse to acknowledge this. The rise in Jew-hatred, they say, has been caused by the policies of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the extremist members of his coalition.

Many British Jews, under siege from the largest rise in Jew-hatred in the world last year, similarly blame Israel for their plight.

Seeking scapegoats to avoid the reality that’s staring them in the face, such myopic Jews ignore the steady rise in Jew-hatred that’s occurred over the past several decades in lockstep with the radicalisation of the left and the increasing dominance of “Palestinian” propaganda.

The most agonised Jews, however, are those liberal progressives who had the ground on which they stand knocked away from underneath them by the atrocities of the Hamas-led onslaught against Israel on October 7, 2023.

Unable to deny that their own side had sanitised and supported the Palestinian Arabs, who revealed themselves on that terrible day to be depraved and psychopathic savages, they still cling to many of the delusional lies and distortions of the progressive mindset that cast Israel as the villain of the region.

Now, however, they are being presented with a choice they can’t ignore. To be accepted as New Yorkers, Jews are being expected to denounce Israel and renounce Zionism.

Buchdahl got the point. She told Mamdani: “You continue to divide Jews into those whose politics you deem acceptable and Zionists whom you cast beyond the pale.”

America is now following down a very hard road trodden by British Jews for more than two decades.

Even while Israelis were being blown to kingdom come in the Second Intifada, the Israel Defence Forces were being called “Nazis” in Britain for trying to destroy the terrorist infrastructure in the “West Bank.” And British Jews were accordingly presented with an ultimatum: If you don’t denounce Israel, then you aren’t to be considered fully British.

Today, the Israel wedge is also being used to marginalise Jews in New York by splitting them off from mainstream society. But it’s also splitting progressive Jews down the middle. An anguished debate is now taking place among them about the relationship between Zionism and Judaism.

Tragically, many of them see no innate connection between the two. Jonathan Jacoby, the national director of the Nexus Project, a left-wing antisemitism watchdog, said the conflation of Jews and Israel was “one of the most serious challenges that we face.”

The ignorance makes one want to weep. Judaism holds that the Jewish people were given a divine command to establish a righteous society in the land of Israel. Jewish religious laws are rooted in the land. Jewish liturgy is studded with references to Zion.

While of course Jews remain Jews even if they are neither observant nor Zionists, anti-Zionism, which would destroy the religion by detaching it from the land, is therefore inescapably anti-Judaism.

Progressive Jews don’t get this because they’ve bought into the worldview that liberal universalist or Marxist ideologies, along with the “intersectionality” they have spawned, are authentic Jewish values. They think anyone telling them that these are all, in fact, anti-Jewish ideologies is a bad person and therefore “right-wing” — for them, the ultimate evil.

As a result, they believe many of the lies about Israel. They can’t grasp that the demonisation of the Jewish state is precisely what’s been done to destroy Jews down through the centuries.

So they end up in the same place as the Jew-haters, claiming that the Jews are using the charge of antisemitism to cover up the crimes of Israel. Believing that “the right” is monstrous, they have ended up supporting monsters themselves.

This is hardly being helped by the behaviour of certain Israelis. A public letter was sent this week to US President Donald Trump by Matan Vilnai, an Israeli politician and a former deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces, on behalf of Commanders for Israel’s Security, an organisation representing hundreds of retired senior Israeli officers.

The letter claimed that “escalating violence in the West Bank” by “Jewish terrorists” was poised to “ignite the region” and that much of it was being orchestrated by members of the Israeli government.

This deeply impressed New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who laid into “anti-Palestinian settler terrorism” and dismissed Netanyahu’s claim that only about 150 youths were involved.

Even if 1,000 individuals were involved, that would still only represent 0.2 per cent of the total Jewish population of around 500,000 in Judea and Samaria.

And these unprovoked attacks, while undeniably a problem that needs to be far better dealt with, are vastly exceeded by the many thousands of murderous Arab attacks against Jews living in these areas.

These have hugely increased since October 7 and now threaten a third intifada. To which neither the Israelis nor Stephens made any reference at all.

“Settler violence” has been grossly exaggerated and decontextualised as another libel with which to demonise Israel. Vilnai and his colleagues belong to a cadre of Oslo “two-state solution” diehards for whom, along with most of the Israeli media and a large section of the intelligentsia, Netanyahu and the “settlers” are the enemy who are always guilty as charged.

Israelis like Vilnai and his ilk have disproportionate influence in the West. They not only provide priceless ammunition for the enemies of the Jewish people, but also play into the ignorance and prejudice of many diaspora Jews—a rising number of whom are turning against Israel.

The increasing gap between Judaism and Israel needs to be closed very fast. That means teaching the Jewish community, particularly the young, essential truths about Judaism and Jewish history in the land of Israel. It means teaching them how Israel always upholds international laws. It means teaching them that real Jewish values are, in fact, the things they most deeply believe in and in which they can take pride.

Jews of all denominations need to raise their game to do this. But progressive rabbis, who will need all their courage to confront deeply rooted, damaging assumptions, have the most crucial and challenging role of all.

*** My new book, Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege, can be bought on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and other Amazon sites. Melanie.

Somalia.

 

Fri 31 Jul at 17:03

View email in your browser Please pray! Somalia One of our partners works to evangelise and disciple Somalis, particularly in northern Kenya. The work includes radio ministry, church planting and practical support for those Christians who have had to flee, or who have been ostracised by their community, because of their Christian faith. Pray for God’s protection of, and provision for, all Somali Christians who are from a Muslim background. Pray for boldness as they share the gospel with others. Pray for a Somali Family Discipleship weekend taking place in Nairobi, Kenya, in August. Pray that God would be at work in the lives of both the parents and the children. Pray for a Somali Christian who is involved in our partner’s work and who mentors and disciples Somali women. Pray that the safe house she runs will indeed be a safe place for Christian women to grow in the Lord. Somalia To find out more about the country of Somalia, what it is like to be a Christian in that country, and the extent of persecution faced by Christians in that country, click the button below. LEARN MORE