Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, my views are very much in line with those of the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft. My father was an Army doctor who was at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, when 13,000 unburied bodies were found, alongside 60,000 surviving skeletons, 14,000 of whom died in the first three months after liberation. My father would certainly have demanded an appropriate Holocaust memorial in central London, as do I.

The case is overwhelming, lest we forget—but why Victoria Tower Gardens? I listened very carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, but I did not hear an explanation as to why he overruled his commission, which looked at 29 sites and recommended three, by choosing one that was in neither the 29 nor the three. I do not understand why there has to be such a downside to establishing the memorial centre that we undoubtedly need.

I can see that Victoria Tower Gardens would be quite a good place to have another statue, ideally of the same quality as the Burghers of Calais, and I think I understand the concept of the design, with its—no doubt deliberately—ugly spines and its ramp, underground bunker and gates of Hades. But where I part company completely with the plan is that there is absolutely no way you can site there an education centre of the kind that we need, as the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, said. For me, it is the education centre that really matters. The place is too small for an appropriate centre and yet far too big for the site. Surely the right place for auditoria, lecture theatres, cinemas and so on, where successive generations can learn, is where people now go to learn.

In Washington, the admirable Holocaust museum is alongside the Smithsonian. Our young people go to our museums quarter in Kensington, to the British Library or to the museum in Southwark. I do not see why we have to do co-location and, if we have to do co-location, I do not see how we can do it in Victoria Tower Gardens, because there is no room for the sort of education centre that we need.

Why do we need it? We need it because it was a horrific event and one in which we were involved. On the wrong side, the Germans rightly commemorate the horror of what they did and teach it in schools; we need to teach the horror of what we failed to do. I salute the grandfather of the noble Lord, Lord Russell, but his was very much a minority position.

Our Government’s response to the Nuremberg laws and to Kristallnacht was not to protest, offer sanctuary and amend the Aliens Act. On the contrary, our Government hung back, and went on hanging back, which is one of the reasons why the Évian conference and the Bermuda conference failed. Nobody stepped in. We did not attempt to encourage others to step in or step in ourselves.

Kindertransport was an admirable initiative, but not one backed by government, who insisted that hosts had to guarantee full financial sponsorship. Only in 1946, with the war over, was UK citizenship on offer to the tragic orphans of Kindertransport. In 1938, the Daily Mail shouted:

“The way stateless Jews and Germans are pouring in through every port in this country is becoming an outrage”.


We need to learn about that, and we need to learn from that. Today, the Daily Mail still sings a similar song, but now it is about asylum seekers. The Sun talks about “migrants storming Kent’s beaches”. A recent Home Secretary talked about “invasions” and the last Prime Minister saw the Rwanda scheme as a potential vote winner. Manston, although bad, is no Bergen-Belsen, but we still need to be regularly reminded of where monstering minorities can lead.

So, I strongly back an education centre. If we fail to learn from history, we risk repeating it. However, we need a proper education centre, which means we need a proper plan. We need to go back to what the commission set up by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, originally recommended when it comes to the question of sites.