Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Strathcarron Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathcarron (Con)]

My Lords, I think it is fair to say that this whole project has not worked out as originally intended 10 years ago. Like so many other noble Lords, my objections are not to a memorial and learning centre—of course not—but to the location in Victoria Tower Gardens. From the start there was no consultation about using a public park and no assessment of the feasibility of choosing Victoria Tower Gardens. Worse, there was still no transparency or consultation when the fateful decision, the so-called “moment of genius”, was taken two months later to build the associated learning centre underneath the memorial.

This is a wonderful example of top-down decision-making where every consideration was given to grandiose gestures and political symbolism and very little given to the effect all this would have on those who had to live with it. The great and the good, deciding all this from on high, did not even research that there was an existing Act of Parliament forbidding them from doing exactly what they wanted to do. All this is precisely why nine years later we find ourselves in the mess we are in today.

Next, £50 million of taxpayers’ money was agreed to make this happen. Needless to say, nine years later that £50 million is heading north towards £200 million. Let us face it: no one has the faintest idea of what this will eventually cost. We have a wonderful example right here on our doorstep—the renovated Elizabeth Tower, which was signed off at £29 million and ended up costing £81 million.

It goes without saying that nine years later, following that fateful decision, not a single brick has been laid. We now have a situation where pretty much everyone who is affected by this decision is against it and the only people seemingly still for it either are not directly affected by it or are involved in it. In business studies courses, this syndrome is known as escalation of commitment theory and the sunk cost fallacy principle. Both describe themselves but can be summed up as a management, in this case the Government, continuing to double up on promises and investments already made rather than objectively assessing what is before them and what is likely to lie ahead—a lack of thinking that always leads to compounding the problem rather than solving it. Think HS2 or NHS Test and Trace as other recent examples.

In the same way that this project has suffered from chronic overspend, it has also suffered from mission creep as the focus has spread from the Holocaust as we know it to the memory of subsequent genocides in general. This brings me to my main objection. These new genocide memorials will be absolutely guaranteed to attract the many hundreds of thousands of demonstrators we have seen regularly marching through London who believe passionately that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza against the Palestinians. The fact that these demonstrators do not follow the dictionary definition of genocide is totally beside the point. They believe it is a genocide and so, for them, that is exactly what it is. To think that they will not descend on the Holocaust memorial in their hundreds of thousands to protest against Israel at what they will see as a series of memorials to other genocides is not only an irony beyond belief but wishful thinking of the most delusional kind.

Even if the police manage to secure the area around these Houses of Parliament, what effect will that have on not only those of us who work here but, much more to the point, the many hundreds of thousands of people who live and work near us? It is so obviously a police and public order disaster waiting to happen that that alone should be enough reason to pause and relocate before it is too late.

This whole ill-gotten, ill-fated project is in the wrong place at the right time. It is not too late to put the nine wasted years behind us and agree a better site. There are many far more obvious ones on offer. It is a difficult decision for those involved in keeping it alive, but the public interest must come first and it is our role in this House to make sure that it does.