Holocaust Memorial Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, no one doubts the good intentions of a desire to memorialise and pass on more learning about the Holocaust to new generations. However, I have a lot of sympathy with the concerns articulated so well by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and her numerous supporters here today. I worry that the project is likely to be counterproductive and divisive, as the noble Lord, Lord Black of Brentwood, has just explained.

Of course we can all support learning, but just repeating the word “learning” does not guarantee learning. Education depends on the content of what is being taught. If this learning centre relativises the Holocaust, you can count me out. But it is difficult to have a serious discussion when we do not know what it is that we are going to be learning. We can all agree on the importance, especially now, of putting the fight against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial at the heart of our democracy, but to see this as a geographical question rather than a moral one—to think that by placing the learning centre and memorial literally next door to Parliament will solve a problem—seems superficial to say the least, and lacks imagination.

I want us to use our imagination to consider what is being envisaged and to ask whether it matches up. As a visitor arriving at this new learning centre, you might assume that it must be at least as impressive as the superb Holocaust collections at the Imperial War Museum, already praised here today. Surely this new venture will or should be a world-class facility, including perhaps a comprehensive new museum to help people understand Jewish culture and history, with a detailed historic account of the changing forms that Jew-hatred has taken—or maybe not, because then we read those dread words, “high-tech immersive experience”. Those words should send a chill down all our spines. This is little more than a grandiose visitor centre, with limited intellectual depth. How do I know that? Because each visit is expected to last only 45 minutes. What an insult. This is a TikTok version of the Holocaust learning experience.

We then emerge from this underground, fully digital exhibit and face the magnificent site of the non-digital Palace of Westminster. I suppose this is where I worry about the motivations around the location. I worry that we are using the Parliamentary Estate as a prop for a narrative; the creation of an optical link between British democracy and “never again”. I find it somewhat unsettling that we would force visitors’ gaze away from the victims of Nazi extermination and shift it to our own Parliament, as though it was a bulwark against anti-Semitism and genocide. This, uncomfortably, is close to self-congratulatory in tone.

I am usually the kind of person who warns about the fashionable war on the past, with, for example, the decolonisation movement insisting on an entirely negative account of British history and accomplishments. However, the antidote to that trend is not to construct a simplistically positive rendition of history. If this project wants the public to gaze up at the Palace and celebrate the British Parliament as a saviour of the Jews in the Second World War, I find that problematic. I am sure that we do not want to be accused of spreading historic misinformation by forgetting to mention the many obstacles that Parliament put in the way of Jews fleeing fascist Germany, or the well-documented virulent and widespread anti-Semitism in the most senior ranks of the Civil Service at the time, and so on and so forth.

Let us imagine today visitors emerging from the learning centre and looking up from Victoria Tower Gardens to Parliament. What would they see, if we were being honest? This week, they would see a betrayal—British politicians attempting to disarm the Jewish nation after it suffered the worst act of anti-Semitic barbarism since the Holocaust. Turn the gaze the other way: I worry that politicians will look out to Victoria Park Gardens at this new memorial and conclude, complacently, “We built that. It proves that we’re fighting anti-Semitism and, what’s more, we’re now stamping down on far-right bigotry”. So dazzled by its own creation, Parliament will turn a blind eye to the tens of thousands of progressives carrying placards featuring swastikas defiling symbols of Israel, or turn a deaf ear to the ugly pro-Jihadist, anti-Semitic chants in the Westminster vicinity. There is a lot more to fighting anti-Semitism than props. Finding a fitting memorial and a proper way of teaching and learning is not contained within this proposal.