Holocaust Memorial Day

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Friday 2nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome today’s debate and thank the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, for opening it. I am honoured to take part. I also applaud the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, whom I shall mention later.

The briefings from the Holocaust Education Trust and from an organisation which I admit is new to me, Protection Approaches, have been most valuable. The work of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust in organising the remembrance events on and around 27 January is also much appreciated, as is that of the Antisemitism Policy Trust—which ran a recent oral briefing that I was grateful to be able to participate in—of the Community Security Trust and of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

I want to start by commenting on the appalling and frightening treatment to which Conservative MP Mike Freer has been subjected, such that he intends to quit politics, remembering, of course, that two MPs have been murdered in the last few years. I send him my support and best wishes. Like me, he is not Jewish, but his support for Israel and the fact that he represents Finchley and Golders Green, with its substantial Jewish population, have led at least some of his attackers to assume that he is—and in one case to call him a “Jewish pig”. This is a clear example not only of where hatred of Israel and of Jews as a people morph into one but of the fact that we are all, truly, in this together.

Not for nothing is this year’s chosen, and inspired, theme of Holocaust remembrance the “Fragility of Freedom”. We can see it right there in the experience of Mike Freer and of others—I very much regret that the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, is getting abuse as well—and in the fact that the horrendous, brutal mass atrocities of 7 October perpetrated by Hamas largely on Jews, celebrated in some quarters as acts of “resistance”, have been followed by an explosion in incidents of anti-Semitism, as well as of Islamophobia, across the globe, including, sadly, in this country.

We think at this time of the 1,200 people murdered on 7 October and of the 136 hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza. As my colleague Alistair Carmichael MP told the other place,

“when I read stories about a restaurant opening in Jordan called ‘October 7’, frankly I despair. It is something that has to be called out and dealt with wherever it happens”.—[Official Report, Commons, 25/1/24; col. 464.]

I am affected, I am ashamed, by such expressions of hatred, and I, like others. must stand up and be counted. As the poet John Donne wrote:

“No man is an island,

Entire of itself …

Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee”.

In opening the Holocaust Memorial Day debate last week in the other place, Dame Margaret Hodge recalled how her grandfather came to England in March 1939, was classified originally as an “enemy alien” and was sent to Liverpool to live in unsanitary conditions, Jews housed with German Nazis. A few days after he arrived, Dame Margaret’s grandfather commented:

“Because of the lack of language skills very lonely, depressed, cannot memorise, miserable pronunciation. Living like a recluse”.


Even six months later, he said that those who stayed in Vienna

“may have saved themselves from all the horrors and all the difficulties of emigrating”.—[Official Report, Commons, 25/1/24; col. 459.]

His freedom was indeed fragile, and those remarks cause us to reflect on our treatment of refugees today, our attitudes towards their undoubted courageous struggles and dehumanising language used against them.

The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, whose emotions today are so understandable, has done as much as anyone in this House, or indeed this Parliament, for the cause of refugees, especially child refugees, of which of course he was one. He was reported in the Guardian newspaper to have been very relieved at the demonstrations across Germany against the far-right AfD party, saying that

“it’s a good sign that people are demonstrating and saying this was not their sort of Germany”—

that was reflected in the remarks that he made earlier. I strongly support his suggestion of bringing the Berlin Bundestag exhibition to London, perhaps even to this House.

Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert has inspired much admiration over the years, and her great-grandson Dov Forman has picked up her mantle. As he tweeted recently,

“it has been alarming to see attempts to erase the specific Jewish identity of the Holocaust’s victims. The Holocaust wasn’t just a human tragedy; it was a targeted genocide of 6 million Jews. Families were obliterated solely for being Jewish … It’s crucial to remember the Holocaust for what it was: a systematic, state-sponsored pursuit to annihilate every Jewish man, woman, and child. This was the racist core of Nazi ideology, a belief in a racial struggle that justified the total destruction of the Jewish people. To honour the victims, we must speak the truth of their identity”.

As we recall and commemorate other Nazi victims such as Roma, gay men, disabled people and political opponents, and other genocides and horrors such as in Darfur, Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia and the Rohingya, we must not lose sight of the specific nature and intent of the Shoah.

This is not the time to enter into the controversy about the siting of the Holocaust national memorial and learning centre, but I very much welcome the prospect of such a memorial and centre, wherever located. It must provoke action, as well as reflection on the vow of “never again”.

Dov Forman also commented on how

“this dark chapter in history wasn’t only about mass murder. It was the destruction of a rich Jewish culture and civilisation that had thrived for thousands of years. To remember the Holocaust is to acknowledge both the Jewish lives and the Jewish life that was lost”.

When I visit Holocaust or Jewish museums, as recently I did in Prague, or when last year I revisited Yad Vashem, I linger over photos of people and families going about their business, living increasingly integrated lives in their European countries, as they were in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then I realise with a shock how fragile that apparent normality turned out to be, because of hatred of who Jews are, pure and simple.

Anti-Semitism in Europe has a very long history of routine ingrained intolerance, discrimination and second-class treatment, then growing into persecution, expulsion and pogroms. But the speed and ease of the rise of Adolf Hitler, his thugs and his twisted ideology of hate is of another dimension altogether, and what is deeply frightening and instructive is how all too much of society enabled it, or at least did not resist.

I spoke earlier of the NGO Protection Approaches, which makes a strong case for an atrocity prevention strategy to combine vigilance against incipient hatred with action to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity, and to end the impunity for it. It refers to the 2022 report from the International Development Select Committee entitled From Srebrenica to a Safer Tomorrow: Preventing Future Mass Atrocities Around the World, on how the UK can show global leadership in this regard. I do not know whether the Minister can say anything in her closing remarks about what our Government can and are doing on that score to prevent what I think she called “mass murder in plain sight”.

Finally, it is up to all of us to speak up, raise the alarm, hold perpetrators accountable and seek justice. The fragility of freedom means that it can slip away bit by bit, unless we are all eternally vigilant and resolute.

International Women’s Day

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Friday 10th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin of Kennington, who has spoken in almost every International Women’s Day debate in this House, this is the first time that I have done so, and I have been in the House for 25 years. I was pleased to agree with what she said, except perhaps about getting more Conservatives into Parliament. I also warmly congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Lampard, on her maiden speech.

I have never particularly campaigned on the rights of women. I spent my political life campaigning on rights pertaining to all types of characteristics other than sex, but at nearly 72 I find that things are either not improving or going backwards. I became an adult in the late 1960s and 1970s, when things seemed inexorably to be getting better for women almost universally, even in countries such as Afghanistan and Iran. Such illusions have been shattered, however, showing the fragility of women’s rights. Of course things have improved greatly in this country and the rest of the developed world, although patchily, but we should all feel a sense of shame to read in the Ipsos study that almost 40% of Generation Z are fearful of speaking up for women’s rights for fear of reprisals.

Given that our theme today is education, our first thought must be the girls and young women in Afghanistan and Iran, refused education or, in Iran, mysteriously poisoned at school. Although that is acutely discouraging, there are bright notes elsewhere, such as in Africa, where the African Girls Can Code Initiative builds digital skills. I very much agree with the call by the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, for the Government to reconsider the cut to BBC Persian.

The first government international women and girls strategy is admirable but, as others have commented, the cuts to international aid bring into question the coherence of that strategy. In rights to sexual and reproductive health, including abortion, there was a huge step backwards in the United States last year as well as around the world. I imagine that US support for such rights through international aid are also at even greater risk now than they were when I was an MEP and the EU was taking up the slack to a considerable extent. Is the UK co-operating with partners, including Nordic countries and the EU, to fill the breach, whatever the US does? While those Nordic countries are top of the international gender quality rankings, the UK is only 33rd in the world in closing the gender gap in education and 44th for closing the gender gap in economic participation. These are sobering facts.

The Minister said that the Government want to support women into, or back into, the STEM workforce in particular. Generally, as we know, the Government lament the employment gap, but as others have said, the availability and affordability of childcare is crucial and we also know that many mothers are struggling. A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers said that women are being priced out of work and in inner London, where I live, a nursery place costs a mother 50% of her take-home pay. It is surely a no-brainer to try to solve that problem. There is also a particular gap between the end of maternity leave and the age of three, so the gender gap is actually widening in pay due to the financial penalty of motherhood. That is a disgrace.

Digital skills are key to employability and coping with modern life, including for older people and especially for women who have not acquired those skills in their lives. I was bereaved a few years ago but I was able to cope with the extraordinary amount of bureaucracy—the unnecessary burden of which is another story, one I mean to pursue with Ministers again—and with the online stuff. A lot of older widows, in particular, cannot because their husbands used to do all the bills and finances. I hope that the noble Baroness can tell us something about what the Government are doing to support digital skills for adults.

In fact, developments for girls and women at home are not so great overall. There seems to be a tsunami of misogyny, offline and online, which is partly what has prompted me to speak today. Some of that misogyny has been around for ever and is only now being uncovered, exposed to some extent and partially addressed, such as in the police. The comment from the former acting boss of the Metropolitan Police that many rape complaints stem from “regretful sex” is both astonishing and deeply depressing.

We need a cultural revolution in this country to change attitudes among men and boys, as well as among women and girls. You still find females being patronised and called stroppy, bossy or aggressive when males would be praised for their assertiveness, boldness and leadership skills. Many of us, however, have had huge and essential support from the men in our lives, as I did from my late father and my late husband. Confident men do not fear confident women.

I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, said on biology. I believe that we need a change in the law. I support the petition organised by the organisation Sex Matters, which has been signed by 100,000 people and will therefore be debated in the other place, calling for reform of the Equality Act so that the protected characteristic of sex is clarified as meaning biological sex. It can apparently be done via the Gender Recognition Act, and it is not transphobic or bigoted to call for this legal clarification. Gender and sex have become conflated in popular parlance, probably because we were a bit coy about the term “sex”. The Gender Recognition Act uses gender and legal sex in the same section, but legally this has become very problematic, especially following a Scottish legal judgment which said that legal sex and biological sex are the same. This needs sorting out, and I hope the Minister can assure us that the Government are attentive to this issue.

Mortgages: EWS1 Form

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, we have been working very hard to ensure that there is clear guidance about when such a form is necessary. In certain instances, there is deemed to be sufficient life-safety risk that an EWS1 form is required. The issue at hand is to ensure that lenders take a proportionate approach, and that is best achieved through dialogue.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, this whole issue is an appalling scandal affecting several million innocent victims, for which developers, building owners and government are responsible, not them. More than 600,000 people in England are currently living in high-rise buildings with dangerous cladding, and there are more than 2 million mortgage prisoners, unable to move because of cladding issues. Why are the Government continuing to inflict massive distress and anxiety through the financially crippling costs of remediation works, which these leaseholders should not have to pay? Why are the Government refusing to offer up-front funding for those leaseholders, off-setting it by future recovery from those who are actually at fault?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I think we are straying a little away from the original Question, which was about external wall systems and the need for a certificate to ensure that lenders have the information they need to lend. As I said in answer to the previous question, for 50% of those who make mortgage applications, an EWS1 form is in place, and we continue to take a number of measures and steps to make the provision of an EWS1 form easier.

Anti-Semitic Attacks

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Minister of State, Home Office and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Lord Greenhalgh) (Con)]

I completely agree that we must stand in solidarity with British Jews. The events we saw in the past week were abhorrent and I am pleased the police acted swiftly to arrest four individuals for that offence of driving up and down Finchley Road. Equally, there was the violent attack on Rabbi Rafi Goodwin in Chigwell, and I am pleased to say that the latest news is that the police have arrested two individuals concerning that incident.

[Baroness Ludford (LD) [V]]

My Lords, it is poignant that today’s exchange on anti-Semitism coincides with the important Jewish festival of Shavuot, which has kept some of our colleagues away from this debate. One of the examples that accompanies the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, is

“Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”

Can the Minister tell the House what steps the Government are taking to ensure that all public and private bodies adopt not only the definition but also the examples? Can the Government stress at every opportunity that the supposedly pro-Palestinian demonstrations of recent days have actually been pro-Hamas, and not in support of the Palestinian people?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, this Government are very proud of the fact that they were the first adopters of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, and we are working very hard to ensure that that is fully embedded across our universities and local councils and, of course, every single Member of Parliament, bar one, has also signed up to that definition. It is important that we take that forward and we will continue to work very hard to ensure that we tackle anti-Semitism wherever we see it.