Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Goodman of Wycombe Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

My Lords, I shall ask three questions, if I may. First, does Britain need a new Holocaust memorial? Secondly, if it does, is this the right scheme? Thirdly, if it is the right scheme, is it in the right place? We must all answer these questions for ourselves, and my answers are as follows.

Does Britain need a new Holocaust memorial? As the Minister correctly said at the start, the present generation of survivors is passing away and I believe we need a new something. It might be a new memorial; it might be a new Jewish Museum; we might prefer to put resources into Holocaust education, which does not seem to be in a particularly good way; we might prefer to build on what we have already got in, say, the Imperial War Museum. However, all these considerations are somewhat theoretical, because the only proposal we actually have before us is the one pointed to in the Bill, so we must weigh that carefully.

Secondly, do we need this particular scheme? Here I pick up a concern originally aired in this debate by the noble Lord, Lord Mann, about the content. My concern is as follows. A learning centre can focus either on the Holocaust in the context of 2,000 years of European anti-Semitism and the story of the Jewish people, with its joys and sorrows, not forgetting the others who also died in the Holocaust, or it can range more widely through racism to, as the last speaker suggested, other genocides, such as the Rwandan one. I would have no objection, myself, to the Rwandan genocide being referenced in the learning centre, but here we run into a problem, which is that the idea of genocide is somewhat contested. There is a legal definition, a sociological idea, a political and policy idea and then finally there is a popular idea in which genocide tends to merge into crimes against humanity, which in turn tend to merge into war crimes. It is perhaps a feature of modern warfare that any war that involves a mass loss of civilian life risks incurring the charge of genocide, whether that charge is justified or not. In short, I am concerned, given that we appear to know so little about the content of the learning centre, that the unique horror of the Holocaust may be lost, though against this I have to weigh the expertise of the historians who will advise and the reliability of the committee that appointed them—although I have to add that it is not yet clear to me what the successor body to that committee will be and how subsequent appointments will be made.

Finally, is it in the right place? I can add nothing to what noble Lords have already said on that score. I feel, myself, that a learning centre does not necessarily have to be in the shadow of the Palace of Westminster, though I understand that other noble Lords feel differently, and their feelings about this may well be more important than mine.

In conclusion, it seems to me that where the Bill is going is that at Third Reading, the choice may well be between the proposal the Bill points to or making do simply with what we have. If that is the choice, I will cross that bridge when I come to it, but I hope and believe that the questions I have raised are good questions and I look forward to pursuing them in Committee and on Report.