"Welby’s Ancestors Owned Slaves, Yours Worked in a Mill – But Guess Who’s Saying Sorry?"

the irony of Justin Welby urging us to confront the sins of the past when most of us are still confronting the sins of our overdrafts. If you’ve spent your life in a terraced house with drafts more ferocious than a medieval siege, you might find Welby’s piety a touch rich. After all, while his ancestors were sipping rum on Jamaican plantations, many of ours were probably coughing up bits of lung in a Lancashire mill or being shipped off to the front line in some imperial adventure we didn’t ask for. But now, apparently, we’re all expected to take part in a nationwide guilt trip.

To be clear, Welby’s call for “confronting legacies” is very noble—if you’re a direct descendant of someone who profited handsomely from enslavement. And for him, it’s a bit like discovering your house was built on a cursed burial ground and then offering your neighbours a few quid to say sorry. He’s both the inheritor of privilege and the penitent, asking the rest of us to grapple with the moral burden of colonialism. But the trouble is, for most of the plebs, our ancestors were not lounging about in drawing rooms deciding what to do with their Jamaican estates. They were trying to make it through another 18-hour workday without losing a limb in the factory. So, Welby’s high-minded apologies feel like a sermon for an audience that didn’t even have a ticket to the colonial lottery.

Now, this isn’t to say that ordinary Brits don’t have a stake in confronting Britain’s imperial history. The empire, after all, shaped the world we live in today. But it’s hard to feel a deep, personal responsibility for the atrocities of slavery when your ancestors were more likely to be cannon fodder in some far-flung colony than part of the plantation-owning gentry. While Sir James Fergusson was making a tidy sum off the backs of enslaved people, many of us had forebears whose sole brush with privilege was maybe a knock-off cotton shirt made by underpaid hands a few thousand miles away.

The problem with Welby’s approach—and the Church of England’s broader attempts at reparations—is that it risks turning the whole thing into a collective exercise in abstract guilt. You see, the British establishment loves a bit of moral theatre: the public apology, the symbolic gesture, the cheque that’s big enough to make the headlines but small enough to avoid serious discomfort. It’s all designed to make us feel as though we’re “doing the right thing,” while conveniently glossing over the more uncomfortable truths. The descendants of those who benefited most are still quite often doing rather well, and the rest of us? Well, we’re still here, paying off the national debt, scraping together a mortgage deposit, and pretending that the high street isn’t dying a slow death.

And let’s not forget the timing of all this hand-wringing. It’s only after a DNA test revealed that Welby is connected to the very same aristocratic class that once profited from the blood, sweat, and tears of enslaved people that he seems to have embraced this new role as the Church’s chief guilt-bearer. Before that, he could quite comfortably preach about sins and redemption without the awkward question of whether his own family benefited from the very system he’s now condemning.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us, there’s a certain weariness to this whole business. Ordinary folk didn’t walk away with vast sugar fortunes from the colonies. Our ancestors, more often than not, were the foot soldiers of empire, the ones sent out to man the barricades and do the dirty work for the upper classes. So, when Welby urges the nation to “confront the legacies of enslavement,” one wonders who exactly he’s speaking to. If it’s the landed gentry, fine, let them serve penance. But if it’s aimed at those of us whose ancestors toiled in industrial hellholes or were shipped off to die in some imperial backwater, it all feels a bit misplaced.

In a world where wealth inequality is alive and kicking, asking the modern-day equivalents of mill workers to collectively shoulder the blame for empire feels like a bit of a distraction. Perhaps Welby should focus more on calling out the institutions—like the Church itself, with its centuries-old coffers—who still benefit from this legacy. After all, it wasn’t your average scullery maid or miner who profited from empire. They were far more likely to end up crushed under its weight.

So, unless Welby’s proposing that the Fergussons of this world should foot the bill, perhaps he should keep his appeals to those whose ancestors truly cashed in. We’ll take care of our own history of exploitation—whether it’s in the mills, the mines, or the military—and leave the upper crust to deal with their slave-owning skeletons.