Yet Another Crisis At The City Of London Council – This Time Around The Publication Of A Report On Its Historical Role In The Slave Trade

We’ve seen an email that Caroline Haines sent to all 125 City of London councillors on Friday, 10 July 2026, about a report on our local authority’s historical entanglement in the transatlantic slave trade. The City council clearly views the paper – which it commissioned in 2021 and that has now been delivered and was discussed in a behind closed doors session of the Policy & Resources Committee last week – to be damaging. Hence the council’s desperate desire, as revealed by the email we reproduce immediately below, to “train” its members in advance to “contextualise” the report’s content. Having allowed readers to see the email, we’ll conclude with a few further comments. The report is authored by William Pettigrew, who as we noted in the eighth instalment of our series of posts The City of London & The Slave Trade, was a key figure in the project Structures & Significance of British Investment in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, c. 1550-1807. Pettigrew was subsequently hired by the…