Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Monday 26th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to the fact that I am the co-chairman of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation. It is a great pleasure to follow the Minister. I thought reminding us of the survivors we have lost this year was a wonderful way to start a speech. Many of them were friends and people we knew, people we shared a joke or a meal with, and people we worked together with for Holocaust remembrance. I mourn them all, but I particularly mourn Manfred, who did such outstanding work. May all of their memories be a blessing.

Whatever the circumstances, we have a whole day’s debate here. I hope the Government will think long and hard next year and ensure that, if not in the precise circumstances under which this debate has occurred, we get a whole day’s debate. I agreed with the Minister’s sentiments and with her speech—as someone once said, I even agreed with the punctuation.

Holocaust Memorial Day challenges us to confront one of the darkest chapters in human history, but remembrance requires more than ritual. It is not enough simply to speak solemnly in Parliament, to stand in silence, or to light a candle once a year. Ceremony without action becomes ceremony without meaning. True remembrance demands leadership—moral, civic and institutional—that is willing to resist hatred in all its modern forms.

In 2025, Britain received a series of wake-up calls that showed how fragile our complacency had become: a violent attack on Jews in Manchester; the conviction of terrorists who planned the mass murder of Jewish people; the shocking murders at Bondi Beach; a pop star calling for the killing of Jews, broadcast on the nation’s media; and the disturbing failure of West Midlands Police, which chose ideology over evidence in describing an antisemitic attack. Each incident triggered brief outrage, followed by national amnesia—shock, condemnation, and then forgetting, and then the cycle begins again. But the danger has not passed. Britain, like much of the world, is sleepwalking into disaster.

We hear the word “genocide” thrown around casually, stripped of its precise and grave legal meaning. This trivialisation obscures the real genocidal ideologies—including those openly embraced by Hamas, whose intent is clear from both its words and its actions. Jew hatred has returned: violently in Israel, genteelly on British streets, and through silence in response to atrocities against Jews elsewhere.

The events of 7 October marked a turning point. The massacre that day was driven by a murderous ideology with deep historical roots. It reveals itself in acts of brutality that defy language: murder, mutilation, rape, and the kidnapping of children and the elderly. Yet almost immediately, the world saw denial, distortion, and the inversion of victims and perpetrators. Those are ancient patterns. Together with modern disinformation, they threaten not only Jewish communities but the principles of liberal democracy.

That is why we must confront the reality of antisemitism today: measurable, documented and rising. The data speaks with clarity. More than 1,500 antisemitic incidents were recorded in the first half of 2025, as the Minister said—the second-highest total ever for that period. There are more than 200 incidents every month. We saw sharp spikes following high-profile provocations, including the chants at Glastonbury, proving how cultural platforms can amplify extremism. University campuses show a slight reduction from the recorded highs of 2024, but a drop from crisis levels is still not normal. A campus where Jewish students hide their identity, avoid events, or face intimidation is not a safe campus, and it does not respect academic freedoms. Antisemitism is not a metropolitan phenomenon. The numbers in Manchester have been described as sickening, but incidents occur in cities, towns and rural communities across the country. This is a national problem.

Institutional responses remain inconsistent: policing varies dramatically from place to place; public bodies hesitate; cultural institutions falter under political pressures; and inconsistency creates space in which extremism grows. We can legislate against crime but we cannot legislate away hatred. The long-term defence is education, yet this is where new challenges have emerged. The number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day has fallen sharply, from 2,000 in 2023 to 1,200 in 2024, and only 850 in 2025. Teachers express uncertainty about discussing modern conflicts. Some refuse to mark Holocaust Memorial Day unless it is reframed. This is not just a moment to reflect; it is a warning, and there is a duty to deal with it. We are at a crossroads and we must address this. We need to ensure that leadership is there. We cannot educate children about the Holocaust unless those children are prepared to be in classrooms. We must recognise that this will affect all of us.

I conclude by dealing with a question that we have grappled with before. We have been worried about the nature of the Holocaust, whether it will be diluted by subsequent holocausts and whether we are going to do “Holocaust-lite”. The debate that we had the other day made it clear that this is not our intention. However, we must not forget the Roma genocide.

It was Danny Danon who reminded me most forcefully that the characteristics of the Holocaust applied also—almost exclusively—to the Roma genocide. People were selected not on the basis of who they were, what they did or where they lived but on the basis of the Nazis’ views on race. He reminded me that Adolf Eichmann, at his trial in Israel in the 1960s, faced charges against him for the Roma genocide. I sincerely hope that the Roma can commemorate their genocide at the new national memorial when it is built. I am pleased to announce that the USC Shoah Foundation in the United States is in negotiations to ensure that we host one of the main servers of that institution’s enormous records of Holocaust testimony. This will ensure that the United Kingdom can bring with it many of its methods of remembrance of the Holocaust.

There are many photographs that bring the Holocaust to mind, but for me two main photographs always bring it back to me. The first I suspect will be familiar to Members around the House: the young boy at the Warsaw uprising who has been arrested, with his hands in the air, surrendering to large German soldiers. I am pleased to say that there is good evidence that the young man survived. The second is of a frightened young girl in a scarf peering out of a cattle truck. She is Roma, she is on the way to Auschwitz and she will not survive. Those two young people show what we lost. They show the possibilities that we did not have. We must confront. We must do more than light candles. We must ensure that our children, our grandchildren and those who survive in a multicultural Britain remember the Holocaust and remember what happens when government goes bad. We will ensure that their memory will always be kept.