Holocaust Memorial Bill

Baroness Harding of Winscombe Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and as a resident of Westminster. I walk my dog in Victoria Tower Gardens and I played with my children in the playground. That is just as relevant an interest as my membership of the foundation.

I wholeheartedly support the Bill and the need for a national Holocaust memorial. It is shocking that, in 2024, we do not have one. I wholeheartedly support this memorial and learning centre in this location.

I fear I have quite a reputation for taking on impossible jobs but, 10 years ago, when my noble friend Lord Cameron asked me to join the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, I did not expect that, 10 years later, I would be speaking in favour of the Bill on the opposite side of so many dear friends who have spoken today. But I will set out a couple of reasons why.

A number of noble Lords said that location does not matter. Location does matter. Any woman who has ever entered an Oxbridge college and looked at all the portraits of men knows that who we memorialise and where we memorialise them matters. So the location we choose for a national Holocaust memorial really is important. The criteria that we used to discuss its location were: prominence and having a truly prominent place in our national fabric; footfall, where millions of people would genuinely come; good transport links; space for contemplation; and the ability to have a learning centre. The proposed location meets those criteria better than any of the 50 other locations that we assessed.

Much has been said with great passion, and no doubt real integrity, about the Imperial War Museum and its outstanding work on the history of the Holocaust. I just point my noble friends and colleagues to the fact that the chairman of the Imperial War Museum is one of my fellow members of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation. This is not being done against the Imperial War Museum; it is being done with it, complementary to it.

Contrary to others’ views, there is not near-unanimous objection to this memorial; it has been supported by every living Prime Minister and the leader of every faith. We have to be careful not to use hyperbole in this debate and recognise that we are at quite a different place from many other leaders in our society about this. Collocation is very important—collocating with the memorial and collocating with other symbols of the fight for freedom and against tyranny and intolerance.

I have gone on a learning journey in the last 10 years on Holocaust education. Although it is obviously important to empathise and try to understand what it might feel like to be a victim or the relatives of victims, the deeper and more important learning is to look into your soul and wonder how you would avoid being a perpetrator yourself. A learning centre that asks us to understand that Britain did not get this completely right at all, and that it would be very easy to walk down the path of intolerance—as we sadly see across the whole world today—is the learning that we need to prompt.

I know that I am a digital fanatic in this House, but much has been said in the debate about 45 minutes not being long enough. Actually, 45 minutes is a long time in which children can form a deep impression that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. We should not think that education is through only history; it is also through experience.

In the short time left to me, I will ask the Minister one question. I was brought on the Holocaust Memorial Foundation because of my digital expertise, in the expectation that there would be planning permission and a building going up fairly swiftly. We needed to think about how to make sure that this was not in just one location but that the learning experience was accessible to people wherever they lived in the four nations of the country. I just ask the Minister to confirm that this Government are similarly committed to making sure that, as we digitise the experience and ask people to look deep in their souls into how they will avoid falling into the trap of intolerance, we do that digitally as well and make sure that schools, particularly, are able to access those materials.

Unlike my noble friend who fears that the park will be destroyed, I look forward to a future when I will still be walking my dog there. Maybe, if I am really lucky, I will be playing with my grandchildren in the playground and telling them a tale about why it is important that we link the horrors of the Holocaust to the horrors of slavery and the fight for female emancipation, about how precious it is to hold on to our democracy and why, therefore, these are all collocated.