Holocaust Memorial Day

Baroness Levitt Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Levitt (Lab) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating my noble friend Lord Katz on his powerful and moving speech. I look forward greatly to hearing the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Sealand, who will speak after me. It is an honour to follow my noble friend Lord Katz.

Like many others, over the past week or so, because I knew that my maiden speech was fast approaching, I have been anxiously listening to those made by my fellow new entrants to your Lordships’ House. By doing so, I have learned that it is customary to start with thanks. I say this because I want to emphasise that, although it is customary, these are not mere words but something heartfelt and sincere from each of us. The extraordinary friendliness and helpfulness of the House officials, the staff, the police and the doorkeepers have made what could have been a rather overwhelming experience feel achievable.

I pay special tribute to the head doorkeeper, who told me with both humour and firmness when I should say “Good morning” and when I should say “Good afternoon”, depending on whether it was before or after Prayers. I can say with confidence that I am unlikely to forget this early lesson.

I thank all my new colleagues on this side of the House, as well as noble Lords from other parties and the Cross Benches, for the warmth of their welcome. I want to thank my supporters. It has been an honour and a privilege to have had the support and encouragement of my noble friend Lord Kennedy of Southwark. Of my other supporter, I shall say a few words in a few moments.

In my professional life, I was taught at an early stage that you start all addresses by summing up the purpose of your speech in a single sentence. My single sentence is this: I am a criminal barrister. This not only explains what I have been doing for the past 40-odd years but illustrates both what I would like to achieve through my membership of your Lordships’ House and why I wanted to speak in this particular debate.

I am going to guess that, when I said I was a barrister, you probably all thought that you could predict who and what I am. Perhaps words like “establishment” and “conventional” may have crossed your mind. But I thought to myself that, as we are likely to be working together for quite a long a time, I should maybe reveal a little bit more about myself, including perhaps a few things that not many people know about me. I reckoned, I am among friends—none of you are not going to tell anybody, are you? It is all going to be okay.

I was astonishingly badly behaved as a child. When I was 14, I was expelled from a school called Roedean for being disobedient and a bad influence on the other girls. My unfortunate, very worried parents had to find a new school for me, not only in the middle of the academic year but in the middle of a term. One school was persuaded to take me, but I had not learned my lesson. My by now rather less worried and more exasperated parents made weekly trips to the headmistress’s office to try to persuade her not to expel me for a second time. Somehow, I just about lasted the course but, decades later, I was visiting the school under my married name—because I was a little unsure of my welcome—when a familiar voice shouted, in a voice you could have heard in Latvia, “Alison Levitt: you were the worst girl I ever taught!” This was my old history teacher. She went on to say that at school I was a total nuisance, always questioning, always challenging everything. But some years later she discovered that I had become a criminal barrister, “And”, she said, “then it all made sense”.

I am not sure how my fellow barristers will feel about a typical barrister being described as a perennial nuisance, but they will probably agree that a constant questioning of the established order is something we all do, and something of which we are rightly proud. I was called to the Bar in 1988. Women barristers were having a pretty terrible time of it generally, but one of the most demeaning things was that we were not permitted to wear trousers in court. Skirts and dresses only—even when you were having to trudge through the snow to some far-flung court where your client, who was charged with sexual assault, would sit there looking at your legs while you were desperately trying to take instructions and pull down your skirt with your other hand.

Fast forward to 1995, when I was chair of the Young Barristers’ Committee. At my monthly meeting with the then chairman of the Bar, my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith, asked me, “What can I do for the Young Bar?” I took my courage in both hands and replied, “Trousers”. He was a little bit surprised but, entirely characteristically keen to do what he could for diversity and inclusion at the Bar, he spoke to the Lord Chief Justice, and within days the rules were changed. As late as 1995, it was a novelty for women to wear trousers in court—I ask you. This remains a moment of pride for me.

By now, you may have noticed a bit of theme about me. If I wanted to self-aggrandise, I could call it wanting to achieve justice and support the rule of law, but I suspect that, more accurately, it is endlessly and exasperatingly insisting on swimming upstream. One of the reasons I am so delighted to have joined your Lordships’ House is that I have a lifelong interest in the purposes of legislation which creates criminal offences, and for this reason. Sometimes, laws are entirely pragmatic and designed to achieve a particular end—the compulsory wearing of seatbelts comes to mind—but sometimes a law does something else as well. The things that we make criminal say something about what our society finds unacceptable. An example of this is the change in the law which made rape within marriage an offence. Some said at the time that there would be hardly any prosecutions because it would be impossible to prove lack of belief in consent, but I was in favour of it because I thought that doing this sent a strong message that our society does not believe that women are the chattels of their husbands. Now, decades later, juries do regularly convict of this offence, so sometimes we legislators can actually influence and bring about social change.

The converse of this is that if there are laws which we do not enforce, it tells society that we do not think these transgressions matter. By not catching and not punishing shoplifters, for example, we run the risk of beginning to legitimise so-called low-level dishonesty, for which I predict there will be a very high social price to pay.

I have said that I am a criminal barrister, but for the last three years I have been a judge, doing criminal jury trials at the epic Snaresbrook Crown Court in east London. I resigned about two hours before the announcement of my elevation to your Lordships’ House. So, I have very recent experience of the sharp end of our criminal justice system, which I hope in due course to be able to put to some use in your Lordships’ House.

Others will speak about, and for, the police, the prosecutors, the solicitors and barristers and the part they play, but for now I want to say something appreciative about my former colleagues, the judges, because I can tell you that to a great extent it is their hard work and good will that are holding the beleaguered crown court system together. They deserve our thanks. Also, as old habits die hard, if I occasionally address noble Lords as “members of the jury”, I hope I shall be forgiven.

So, why make my maiden speech as part of the Holocaust Memorial Day debate? I said a few moments ago that I would come back to my other supporter: my noble kinsman Lord Carlile of Berriew. He and I, as some noble Lords will know, have been married for nearly 20 years. Some of you may have assumed that, because of my family’s surname, I am Jewish, but in fact I am not. He is—at least, his family were. My husband’s parents were both Holocaust victims and survivors: his father’s entire family—first wife, parents, sister, niece—were murdered in Poland by the Nazis. The only one to survive was my sister-in-law, hidden in Poland from the age of two until the war came to an end and she was reunited in the UK with her father. My husband’s mother and her family survived in Poland between 1939 and 1945 by ducking and diving and assuming non-Jewish noms de guerre. For our family, this is the most terrible, up close and personal reminder of what happens when a society forgets why the rule of law matters.

In the 1940s, my husband’s parents arrived in the UK from Poland as refugees from the Nazis. I never met his father, who had died years earlier, but I knew and loved his mother. This is not my story to tell, it is my husband’s, but there is one reason why I wanted to speak of it today. His grandparents, who survived the Nazis but were then trapped in Poland by the Soviet regime, had got through the war by selling a few diamonds, which was all they had managed to salvage of their earlier comfortable life. After the war, they came across a remaining diamond ring, which they then smuggled out of Poland by baking it into a cake and sending it to my mother-in-law, who by now was living in Burnley, Lancashire. This bit of the story my husband cannot illustrate, but I can. This is the ring. I wear it every Holocaust Memorial Day, and I am wearing it today because it conveys this simple message: they survived. They are still standing, right here in the UK House of Lords. So, I too say: never forget; never again.