80th Anniversary of Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Friday 9th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, we have had an interesting series of days commemorating World War II 80 years on. In your Lordships’ House, we have had wonderful tributes from many people and heard about their experiences.

However, it is interesting that many other countries are reported to have marked the event with a more commemorative process, around not glorification but peace, because, as many noble Lords have said, peace is of course not assured. It is about recognising that war now affects whole populations, whatever the outcome. As the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, said, many people in Europe had to wait for 45 years after the end of the Second World War before they got any liberation at all, basically.

We tend to think we were always on the right side—the side of good—but I am afraid our track record is not perfect. My grandfather fought in the Boer War, which was a very long time ago. I do not think he was involved in concentration camps, but we did invent them in South Africa. Boer and African women and children were locked in tented accommodation with very little food, water and sanitation, and no hope of how they might escape. They were the civilian population whose properties had been treated as scorched earth by General Lord Kitchener. Where were they going to live?

It is surprising that only one person was brave enough to challenge these camps: a lady called Emily Hobhouse, who came from Devon or Cornwall. She challenged the Government to provide food and everything like that, and was ostracised by the Government and nearly locked up. Kitchener refused to see her in South Africa because she was a woman, which is an interesting way of looking at things. Hundreds of thousands of women and children were incarcerated, having committed no crime except being on the wrong side. At the end of the Boer War, most of the Boer women and a few others contributed to a very large memorial in Bloemfontein—you can see it on the web—to commemorate 28,000 women and children who died in the camps, plus all the people who managed to get out in the end.

There seemed to be no leadership or understanding here of what was going on. I am not saying that our invention—if that is what it is—of concentration camps was being copied in the two World Wars; the German example was a million times worse. However, it is time that we learned lessons from such things. As my noble friend Lady Amos said: education on these things for all.

We should follow the example of Emily Hobhouse and put much greater emphasis on trying to bring peace, rather than death, on the battlefield—or, in the case of South Africa, death after a scorched earth policy. There are a few scorched earths going on in Ukraine at the moment, and it is still happening in the world, as many noble Lords have said—in Africa, Ukraine and Gaza.

We must remember our successes and failures in an open and inclusive manner, and we need to educate the world, as other noble Lords have said. The transfer and movement of students and young people between different parts of Europe and the world will help their understanding—and our understanding—as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham said. I hope that the movement of students and everyone else will be part of an education process to understand what we have done in the past—mostly very well but occasionally with some serious lapses, which tend to get shoved under the carpet when we should recognise them as well.