Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Austin of Dudley Excerpts

Monday 26th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Austin of Dudley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow that brilliant speech by the noble Lord, Lord Massey. It was a privilege to listen to the fantastic maiden speech by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry.

In March 1939, a 10 year-old Jewish boy in a town called Ostrava, in what was then Czechoslovakia, was woken up in the middle of the night; he got out of bed, looked out of the window and saw German troops marching into the town square. It was the day that Hitler had invaded. A few days later he was put on a train by his mum and teenage sisters. It was the last time he would see them, because they were eventually rounded up, sent first to a ghetto and then to Theresienstadt, before being murdered in Treblinka in October 1942.

That boy came to the UK—he was able to speak only three words of English, which were “hot”, “cross” and “bun”—but he grew up to become the youngest grammar school head teacher in the country and educated tens of thousands of people, including my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsey of Wall Heath. But, much more importantly from my point of view, he brought up four kids, of whom I am the second. In later life, he worked with black and Asian communities in Dudley to establish the racial equality council, raised funds for the Holocaust Educational Trust and spoke at its events. I pay tribute to it and its work.

We have heard in this debate references to statistics about Holocaust education. These are worrying figures, it is true, but HET, which engages with schools all year round, reports that across its programmes, it is working with hundreds more schools than in 2023, before the barbaric attacks on Israel by Hamas, and that this will increase still further with its new Testimony360 programme.

Last week I went to listen, as did a number of Members of your Lordships’ House present here, to the brilliant historian Simon Sebag Montefiore deliver an absolutely riveting lecture at HET’s annual parliamentary event. He said that teaching about the Holocaust and antisemitism is “more vital than ever” as:

“The last witnesses are passing away, while Holocaust denial, distortion, inversion, and what I would call perversion—now joined by eliminationist antisemitism—have made an alarming comeback”.


Those are the points I want to focus on today, but first I pay tribute, as others have done, to the survivors who have died this year; in particular, Manfred Goldberg, Eve Kugler—with whom I travelled to Poland for March of the Living in 2018, along with the noble Lords, Lord Pickles and Lord Shinkwin, and got to know well subsequently—and Harry Olmer, who died last week.

Many Members of your Lordships’ House will have known Manfred Goldberg; I thought he was a great man and a real hero. He survived the death camps, came to the UK after the war, got married, brought up three sons and made a huge contribution to our country in so many ways. He was absolutely appalled by the increase in antisemitism we have seen since Israel was attacked on 7 October.

I pay tribute too to the Community Security Trust and the brilliant work it does, led by Sir Gerald Ronson and Mark Gardner. We saw how important its work is on Yom Kippur last year, when two Jewish men, Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz, were killed when an Islamist extremist terrorist attacked Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester. This was not a random attack on a shopping centre or in the street; Jewish people were attacked, at a synagogue, because they were Jews. It was murderous, brutal racism.

Then we saw a court case in which Islamist extremists were convicted of planning to murder Jewish people at schools, businesses, synagogues and even a march against racism, in what the police said would have been,

“the deadliest terror attack in UK history”.

These attacks do not happen in isolation. A recent YouGov survey suggests that more than one in five British people now hold entrenched antisemitic views—twice the level of four years ago. The CST’s research shows that antisemitic incidents are running at record levels, and Home Office statistics show that Jewish people are 10 times more likely to be the victims of religious hate crime than any other group.

On 7 October, at the same time as terrorists were murdering and kidnapping civilians and committing the greatest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust, people here in the UK celebrated on the streets. Weekly marches then made central London and other city centres no-go areas for Jewish people. I went to watch some of these marches. I did not see any banners calling for peace, for hostages to be released or for a two-state solution but—and this is the distortion Simon Sebag Montefiore was talking about—plenty comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, its leaders to Hitler and Gaza to the Holocaust. They say the victims have become the oppressors and that Jews are doing what the Nazis did. Even before the conflict, Gaza was called a “new Warsaw Ghetto”.

What could more offensive than routinely accusing a country built by Holocaust survivors—the only democracy and equal free society in the whole of the Middle East—of genocide, crimes against humanity or committing another Holocaust? These disgusting comparisons are designed to demonise and delegitimise Israel and undermine the very reason for its existence as a safe haven for the Jewish people.

Protesters demand that Palestine stretch

“from the river to the sea”,

which would mean the destruction of Israel and the murder of its citizens. They chant for Israel’s destruction, for “death to the IDF”—even on the stage at Glastonbury and broadcast by the BBC—or to “globalise the intifada”.

Last month, unbelievably, extremists in Birmingham paraded behind a banner saying “One Solution, Intifada Revolution” with the Hamas symbol—the symbol of a proscribed, banned terrorist group—yet the police did nothing about it. The intifadas were terror attacks with suicide bombings, ramming people with cars and attacking them with knives—exactly what happened in Manchester.

It is good that the Met and Greater Manchester Police have finally said that they will start prosecuting people who make these statements, but this has been happening since 7 October. We need assurances that other forces will be required to do the same and that people who do this will be prosecuted with the same speed and determination as those who incite other forms of racism, as we saw, for example, after the Southport attack.

Over the last few years, we have seen Jewish kids attacked on the way to school, students targeted at university, Jewish patients hiding their identity when going to hospital, synagogues smeared with faeces and homes daubed with swastikas, and businesses attacked just because their owners are Jewish. As the Chief Rabbi said, this is a tidal wave of “Jew hatred”.

In Bristol, a Jewish MP was banned from visiting a school in his constituency. It turned out, extraordinarily, that the inclusion and diversity co-ordinator at the trust running the school had praised Hamas’s 7 October massacre as “heroes fighting for justice”. In Birmingham, Jewish people were banned by the police from going to a football match. Here in London, a mob gathers each week to scream abuse at the staff and customers of a restaurant owned by Jewish people. Of course, people have the right to protest in a democracy but not the right to harass Jewish people outside restaurants or synagogues. These people should be arrested and prosecuted. These incidents should be dealt with much more seriously in future.

What is the context in which all this is taking place? Parliament debates Israel more than any other issue—not just more than any international issue but more than any other issue. During the conflict, Parliament debated Israel and Gaza three times more than the NHS, crime, poverty or immigration. How can it be that MPs spend more time on a conflict thousands of miles away—which, if we are honest, though I am not pretending to be an expert on this, many of them know probably not very much about and can do even less to solve it—than the schools or the hospitals in their constituencies that they are responsible for? In Sudan, famine has killed 500,000 children, 10 million people are starving, and tens of thousands of civilians were murdered in just a few days. The UK is the UN Security Council penholder, yet we hardly ever discuss it.

Two weeks ago, on the very first day back after the new year, there was a Statement which was supposed to be on the Middle East and north Africa, but many MPs queued up to speak only about Israel and Gaza. MPs falsely accuse Israel of the worst crimes possible, but the Government concluded that Israel is not committing a genocide—so I would like to hear Ministers start to push back when Back-Bench MPs or others claim that it is.

We see the same obsession, bias and inaccuracies at the BBC, too. For example, when the Government concluded that Israel was not committing a genocide, the BBC pretty much buried the news. When the UN said it might be, it dominated every bulletin for days. The IHRA definition of antisemitism, the official definition that the Government subscribe to, says that demonising Israel, singling it out for criticism, holding it to standards never applied to other countries—which is clearly what is happening—are examples of antisemitism. All this matters because the obsessive demonisation of the world’s only Jewish state obviously drives hostility towards people who are identified with it, which is the vast majority of Jewish people. This is a large part of what drives antisemitism in the UK.

People cannot really promise to oppose antisemitism but then support boycotts, sanctions or embargoes that would prevent Israel from defending its Jewish citizens. People say that there is no place for antisemitism, but this has become meaningless when it is running at record levels, when Parliament and the BBC are fuelling it and when the authorities are not doing nearly enough to deal with it.

We need to be much more robust in standing up for our values. Migration is now a permanent feature of global life: in just four years, 3.5 million people came to live in Britain. Some will have come from places where antisemitism is more common than in the UK—places where the Holocaust is rarely taught, not understood or by many, probably not even believed. So, it is crucial that Holocaust education is increased, expanded and improved.

We have to be clear and say that, if people hate Jews or think Israel should not be allowed to exist, they should be prevented from coming to Britain or staying here to live. The Government and the police must clamp down much harder on extremist preachers making hate speeches in mosques. NHS staff or university lecturers responsible for racism should be sacked. Hate marches cannot be allowed any longer to take over our streets every week; the Government should change the law to curb them, if necessary.

No more empty promises or meaningless platitudes—taking antisemitism much more seriously and dealing with it much more robustly is not just a matter of standing up for the Jewish community, vital though that is; it is fundamentally about what it means to be British. Living in the UK means believing in democracy, equality, freedom, fairness and tolerance. That is what our country stands for. That is exactly what heroes like the late father of the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsey, and his comrades were fighting for in the war. Those values define what it means to be British.

Of course, Holocaust Memorial Day is an opportunity to learn about history’s greatest crimes and pay our respects to its victims, like my dad’s mum and sisters. But expressing our sympathy for people murdered 80 years ago is not enough. Holocaust Memorial Day is the opportunity to dedicate ourselves, especially those of us in positions of leadership and responsibility, not to stand silently by or to mouth empty promises or meaningless platitudes, but to do all we can to fight hatred and prejudice and stand up for the victims of racism today.