Lord Biggar, a retired professor, Conservative peer and Anglican priest, was speaking alongside Lam last September on a Spectator podcast named after his latest book, Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt. Since the church’s commissioners – who manage the church’s endowment – announced in 2023 that they would set up the Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice to make amends for the church’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, Biggar has led the backlash. In doing so he has gone from fringe voice to one of the most widely published proponents of revisionist theories about colonialism and the British empire.
Dozens of articles have been published against Project Spire, as the fund is known in the church, many by Biggar and people who share similar views, in publications including the Spectator, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Times. Lam has led opposition in the House of Commons, asking questions of ministers and in December coordinating a letter from 27 MPs and peers to the incoming archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, accusing the church of “legally dubious vanity projects”. The media blitz has paid off so far, paralysing the church and stalling the fund well beyond its planned launch date of 2024.
The church admitted in July it also faces a legal challenge – which could add years more delay. Yet little attention has been paid to the lobbying campaign against Project Spire – and how it has become a cause célèbre within the broader rightwing ecosystem. The Guardian can reveal how some of Britain’s wealthiest financiers, including Sir Paul Marshall, are linked to the man at the heart of the campaign to kill the church’s fund.
The multimillionaire co-founder of the hedge fund Marshall Wace has given Biggar and his movement a powerful platform via his stable of media outlets, which spans the Spectator magazine, the broadcaster GB News and the comment website UnHerd. A devout Christian, Marshall also funded several rightwing lobbying groups and organisations linked to Biggar to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds. It all appears part of the libertarian financier’s significant efforts to reshape the Church of England – and wider society – in line with his own worldview.
In 2007 Dr Rowan Williams, the then archbishop of Canterbury, set in train a reckoning for one of Britain’s most venerable and staid institutions when he said the church should consider slavery reparations for its historical role in the slave trade. It signalled Lambeth Palace’s determination to atone for those failings – from its distant past to the present day. His successor, Justin Welby, reaffirmed that commitment.
Its initial findings, published in 2022, revealed the funds partly originated in Queen Anne’s Bounty. Queen Anne’s Bounty, which was founded in 1704, invested significant sums in the South Sea Company, which traded in enslaved people – trafficking about 34,000 enslaved Africans. The South Sea Company also received numerous benefactions from individuals such as the slave trader Edward Colston, who were linked to, or who profited from, transatlantic chattel slavery and the plantation economy.
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