Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Verdirame Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 11th June 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Verdirame]

4: After Clause 2, insert the following new Clause—
“Learning Centre purposeThe sole purpose of any Learning Centre must be the provision of education about the genocide of the Jews and antisemitism.”

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group. The first is Amendment 4, and then I have an amendment to that amendment. I have been advised that in these cases it is best first to move the amendment and then to give my main speech on the amendment to the amendment. I beg to move.

Amendment 4A (to Amendment 4)

Moved by

[Lord Verdirame]

4A: Leave out “genocide of the Jews” and insert “Holocaust”

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, Amendment 4, as amended by Amendment 4A, is a limited but important amendment. It clarifies the purpose of the learning centre. At present the Bill says only that there should be

“a centre for learning relating to the memorial”.

The Explanatory Notes add:

“The Learning Centre’s exhibition will explore the part played by Britain’s Parliament and democratic institutions in response to the persecution of the Jewish people and other groups both at the time and subsequently. It will help people understand the way the lessons of the Holocaust apply more widely, including to other genocides”.


At Second Reading, the Minister said:

“The learning centre will also address subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur”.—[Official Report, 4/9/24; col. 1224.]


The website of the Holocaust memorial says that the learning centre is going to provide an honest reflection of Britain’s role surrounding the Holocaust as well as reflecting on subsequent genocides.

We had an interesting and useful briefing with Martin Winstone, the project historian for the Holocaust memorial and learning centre. I am grateful to him for his time and expertise, and I am grateful to the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Khan, for organising that briefing and for his patient and dedicated engagement on the Bill. Martin Winstone reassured us that he and other historians involved in the project are very clear that the focus of the learning centre will be the Holocaust and, in particular, Britain’s role. I have no reason to doubt that commitment and, of course, their expertise.

I also appreciate that it is not the role of Parliament to curate the content of a learning centre or a museum, but it is the role of Parliament to tell those who will curate a learning centre created by Parliament what lessons Parliament thinks must be taught. This is particularly the case given that organisations change over time. The people who are in charge and sit on the various boards today will at some point be replaced. Organisational drift—that is, slow deviation from the organisation’s intended goals—will happen. It always does. At the moment, neither what I see in the Bill and the Explanatory Notes nor what I have heard and read from the historians reassures me that there is the clarity required to prevent this. I am particularly concerned that the various references to subsequent persecution and other genocides foretell that before too long, notwithstanding all the good intentions, this learning centre, unless firmly anchored by Parliament, will also drift.

I am not saying that Britain’s response to subsequent persecutions is not an important topic—it is—nor suggesting that it would not be important to educate people about other horrific atrocities. It would be. In fact, one of my concerns is that we should respect the historical complexity of other atrocities. My first job in academia, as a researcher at the Refugee Studies Programme in Oxford, involved interviewing Rwandans in east Africa in the aftermath of that genocide. Not only was that a harrowing experience but it was intellectually a humbling experience because after months of research on the Rwandan genocide and meeting many Rwandans, I still felt that I had barely begun to understand Rwandan society.

The point is that Rwanda, like Darfur or Cambodia, has a very complex history that would have to be told properly, not as an appendix to the Holocaust and not on the false premise that there are parallels between, say, the Weimar Republic and the regime of Juvénal Habyarimana. Yes, in a legal sense, crimes under international law were committed in all these situations, but the centre does not purport to be—nor, in my view, should it be—a learning centre about international criminal law. Our amendment would give a clear and well-defined purpose to the learning centre to educate people about the Holocaust and about antisemitism. The amendment responds to a basic pedagogic rationale for any learning enterprise: knowing in advance what lessons we are seeking to teach.

In that respect, I am grateful to the noble Lords who in Committee pointed out that the first formulation for this amendment was inadequate. We have reflected on those comments, particularly with the amendment to the amendment, and we now have, I think, the right language, which includes killings by collaborators of the Nazi regime as well as the genocidal persecution of other groups, such as the Roma.

There is a profound moral rationale behind this amendment. It would address the risk of the learning centre drifting into other messages, as I have said, and it is a risk that is neither theoretical nor abstract. We have already had instances of Holocaust commemorations forgetting about the Jews or of such events being used as platforms for other messages. With this amendment, Parliament would send a clear signal that whatever the disagreements about the memorial itself might be, there would have to be none of this nonsense in this learning centre willed by Parliament and right next to Parliament.

As Stephen Pollard, who wrote in support of our amendment in the Spectator today, said:

“This is not about some contest of suffering in which the Jews are declared the winner”.


The amendment is seeking precisely to pre-empt this kind of absurd contest. The risk of losing focus and drifting into other messages is particularly acute given that, at the international level, genocide is being invoked more frequently now than ever before. Before the International Court of Justice there are disputes under the genocide convention between Ukraine and Russia, South Africa and Israel, and Gambia and Myanmar. Also, Sudan recently submitted a dispute against the UAE under the genocide convention. Every international lawyer can explain that the reason for this proliferation of genocide in international litigation and politics is that the genocide convention is often the only legal route available for submitting a dispute to the International Court of Justice. It is certainly the one with the greatest political effect.

Our amendment contemplates a lesson beyond the Holocaust about which the learning centre should seek to educate visitors. It is the most obvious lesson that should accompany Holocaust education: educating about antisemitism. The rise of antisemitism is one of the great moral failures of our times. In our country 33% of religious hate crimes recorded in the year ending March 2024 targeted Jews, who make up barely 0.3% of the British population. According to the latest Global 100 survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, 46% of the world’s adult population—an estimated 2.2 billion people—harbour deeply entrenched antisemitic attitudes. This has more than doubled since the Anti-Defamation League’s first worldwide survey a decade ago, and is the highest level on record since the Anti-Defamation League started tracking these trends globally.

We all know that this memorial could become a focal point for protest and controversy. The least we can do as parliamentarians is to try to nip these controversies in the bud. To do so we need the moral clarity and the moral courage to say that this learning centre, if it is to happen at all, must be about the Holocaust and about antisemitism, and to put this in law.

The fact that both Holocaust denial and antisemitism are rising—especially among the young, as we have seen—shows that our education is failing. The only point of a new learning centre is if it is ready to confront that failure and tackle those two challenges head on. There are of course many other important lessons that we can teach but this should not be the place for them. With so many in our society who still have so much to learn about the Holocaust and antisemitism, it is surely not too much to ask that the learning centre devoted to the victims of the Holocaust should concentrate on these two educational missions and nothing else. I beg to move.

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 4 and 4A, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame.

This has been a passionate debate. It is possible to believe that in the course of time a memorial and a learning centre will be established in Victoria Tower Gardens, they will be a great success and we will all look back and wonder what the fuss was all about, but it is also possible to believe that that will not be the case. If passions continue to run high, I suspect they will be fuelled by a single word: genocide.

I will not repeat the arguments that I made at Second Reading about how the word “genocide” is now contested—a few moments ago the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, put the case more eloquently than I possibly could—but I will leave a single example hanging in the air, having made the observation that it is probably impossible to wage a modern war in which, tragically, there are mass civilian casualties without incurring accusations of genocide, as Israel is currently discovering in Gaza. What I say next, I say with no reference in particular to war in the Middle East or anywhere else, but war crimes are sometimes conflated with genocide, as are crimes against humanity. Appalling and horrendous though both are, genocide is the ultimate crime because it is the attempted extermination of an entire people. In short, I am concerned about mission creep in the learning centre over time.

I pause to pay tribute to the Minister, who I have always found to be extremely helpful. He organised the useful briefing to which the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, has just referred, with Martin Winstone, the project historian. He gave a most impressive presentation—the academics who are advising the project are extremely eminent—and I understood for the first time when the briefing was being given why the Minister specifically referenced Darfur and Rwanda at Second Reading, because it is the Holocaust that set the standard by which horrors since have been weighed, both legally and in other ways, as genocides. I can see all that, and he made a very good case, but Governments change and the Minister will not be here for ever—sadly. What the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, just said about the wording of the Bill and the Explanatory Notes is correct. For all the persuasiveness and attraction of the presentation that we were given, there is as yet no actual content of the learning centre for us to be able to judge. So I would like noble Lords to think of Amendment 4A as a kind of safeguard.

Other amendments this evening, as the debate has gone to and fro, have been characterised as wrecking amendments because they seek to separate the learning centre from the memorial. I make no comment on those debates one way or the other, but the one thing that cannot possibly be said about the amendment is that it is a wrecking amendment. It accepts that there will be a memorial and a learning centre together in Victoria Tower Gardens. It simply seeks to set some guardrails around the content. Were it a wrecking amendment, my noble friend on the Front Bench would not be supporting it, as I understand is the case.

That leads me back to the Minister. I think I know where our Front Bench stands; I now want to hear, when the Minister responds to the debate, what he has to say. I think he is sympathetic to the argument that the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, put and which the amendment stands for. I am hoping that he can satisfy us. If he cannot do that now, it is possible he will be able to do that at Third Reading, but I do not know. If he cannot, and the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, seeks to move the amendment to a vote, I hope that noble Lords will vote in favour.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, there will be future discussions about the governance of the learning centre—those are the safeguards. For now, because I do not want to prolong the House any longer, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am grateful to everyone who spoke. I will briefly make a few points in reply. First, I have no problem at all with the individuals sitting on the academic advisory board; they are all very eminent. I am certainly glad to hear about the involvement from Yad Vashem.

The composition of boards changes over time: different individuals will come on board with different agendas. This is an opportunity for Parliament to set the agenda, and whoever comes on board will have to stick to that agenda set by Parliament.

On whether it is unnecessary, as the Minister said, I have to disagree. It is necessary because we have already seen some drift into other persecution and genocides in the Explanatory Notes, and that is why it is necessary. I do not quite see how it can be described as too narrow. The purpose would be education about the Holocaust and antisemitism. They are two pretty big missions, and we are not doing so well in respect of either of them.

Further, of course commemorations could take place because we are building a memorial commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, so it will be possible in this building to have commemorations. In addition, the fact that the amendment refers to education, which is a broad concept, also enables commemoration as part of education.

I have a lot of sympathy, as he knows, with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, about the inclusion of homosexual victims of the Holocaust. I never had any doubt that individuals who were wearing a pink star in Auschwitz were victims of the Holocaust. I considered, with other Members involved in the drafting of this amendment, alternative versions, and as the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, said, we went through a bit of a journey with the formulation. In the end, we thought Holocaust was the obvious term because it is what the memorial is about: it is a memorial about the victims of the Holocaust. I see that term as inclusive of other groups persecuted and taken to concentration and extermination camps. I am very glad that he raised that point.

Finally, I agree with everything the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, said on legal challenges, but I was a little baffled by the idea that there could be a legal challenge about the meaning of Holocaust. That legal challenge could be brought now because the Bill provides for

“expenditure … in connection with … a memorial commemorating the victims of the Holocaust”.

If somebody wanted to bring a challenge on the basis that the Holocaust is something else, they could probably already do it now. The amendment will not in any way widen the scope for such legal challenges, but it will afford a degree of protection against the risk of mission creep and of this learning centre starting to do things that we all know it is not supposed to do. With that in mind, I have listened to the Minister carefully, but I am afraid I wish to test the opinion of the House.

Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Verdirame Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, I also signed this amendment. I was interested in what my noble friends said, in particular my noble friends Lord Pickles and Lord Tugendhat. The point is that this will be a relatively small area. The appalling and destructive nature of the Nazi regime and its allies, wherever they were found, is well known, but we need to reinforce it. I thought that was the purpose of this: it will be called the Holocaust memorial. Perhaps I have this wrong, but I saw statements that other genocides will be commemorated. It will be too small to commemorate other genocides.

My noble friend Lord Pickles talked about Poles. I remember going to Auschwitz with the excellent Karen Pollock and the Holocaust memorial group. It was the most amazing visit, in 24 hours, and should be repeated: if people have not been to Auschwitz, they should go, and it is particularly well done by Karen Pollock. We all knew it at the time, but guess what? Not all the guards were dyed in the wool Germans —a lot of them were Poles, whatever the Polish Government have said. Sadly, in current times, I am told that a very prominent group in many of the concentration camps, including Belsen, were Ukrainians. I do not know, but I am told that that is true. This should be made plain, but either this is a Holocaust memorial or a memorial to all discrimination anywhere. That is my point. Let us have a Holocaust memorial, not a memorial to discrimination against anybody, anywhere, because otherwise the whole thing will be diluted.

My noble friend has talked about the anti-Israeli behaviour on the streets—let us be quite clear that it is anti-Jewish behaviour on the streets, not just anti-Israel. We need to get that absolutely plain. That is why, wherever we put it, this memorial should be a Holocaust memorial. By all means have charts saying, “And by the way, we are appalled by continuing discrimination wherever it may be”, but let us stick to the Holocaust alone.

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I added my name in support of Amendment 32 because it responds to a concern that I raised at Second Reading. I am sorry that I could not have been here for previous days in Committee when the scope of the learning centre was discussed, and in particular on day 2, when Amendment 2 was debated, and on day 3, when there was a very animated debate around the learning centre.

I was reassured by what the noble Lord, Lord Austin, said about the focus that historians have decided to put on the centre. None the less, I remain a bit unnerved by the language in the Explanatory Notes to which Lord Blencathra has referred, and by the answer that the Minister gave at Second Reading in response to the concern that I and others such as the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, raised. He said:

“The learning centre will also address subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur”.—[Official Report, 4/9/24; col. 1224.]


It seems to me that a learning centre needs focus. It cannot cover all atrocities, whether genocidal or not. All those situations obviously involved very serious crimes against humanity, war crimes at a minimum, and probably genocide—certainly genocide in the case of Rwanda and Srebrenica. I do not claim to have any particular expertise on any of those situations, but I have some knowledge of the Rwandan genocide because I started my academic career interviewing victims of that genocide. Months into my fieldwork, I had only just begun to understand the complexity of Rwandan society, Rwandan history and identities in Rwanda, which are far more complex than people understand. So I just do not see how something as tragic and as complex as the Rwandan genocide could be meaningfully addressed in a learning centre that is already devoted principally to the Holocaust.

Obviously, I would not have any objection to a board at the end referring to other atrocities that may be similar in nature, which I believe the noble Lord, Lord Austin, mentioned. But there is a difference between that message, which can be conveyed at the end, and the intent to address these other genocides as learning experiences as part of the learning centre.

We also need to realise that, unfortunately, the concept of genocide is going through a process of rather intense instrumentalisation at the international level. At the moment, we have at least four disputes involving the genocide convention before the International Court of Justice. We have disputes between Russia and Ukraine, Gambia and Myanmar, South Africa and Israel, and, as of last week, a case brought by Sudan against the United Arab Emirates. The reason for this proliferation of genocide litigation is that the genocide convention is quite often the only treaty that is available against that state for submitting a dispute to the International Court of Justice.

Be that as it may, in each of these cases there will be groups and campaigns which argue that that particular situation is genocidal in nature and comparable to the Holocaust. Those campaigns and groups would contend that those situations would have to be addressed in a learning centre if that centre has pledged, as it seems that this one has done, to address subsequent genocide. I fear that we can expect a great deal of controversy about what counts as a subsequent genocide that needs to be included in this learning centre. We would be much better off avoiding that controversy by defining the scope of the centre at the outset much more clearly. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, has given us a sense of the kind of arguments that we could get into about all the other situations that have been claimed to be genocidal in nature.

I understand the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, but I do not think the issue is whether the learning centre should address what happened during the Shoah that involved non-Nazis or Nazi sympathisers elsewhere in Europe. That is very much part of the history of the Shoah, and therefore the Ustaše, the Hungarian collaborators and the fascists in Italy would all have to be part of that history. Maybe the language can be clarified to make that absolutely clear, but I understand the amendment to say that the focus of the learning centre must be the Holocaust in its entirety.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

It does not say that.

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

The language could be changed to clarify that; the Nazi genocide of the Jews is how I read it. However, what concerns me and the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, is the subsequent genocide and not including the entirety of the Shoah.

I do not see this amendment as disruptive of the Bill, the memorial or the learning centre. Its purpose is to clarify what the centre is about and, as I see it, to ensure that the focus of the learning centre should remain the Holocaust. I would have thought that, understood in those terms, this amendment could attract support from those enthusiastic about the project, those who are less enthusiastic and the sceptics. However, I understand that that may not be the case.

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I have an amendment in this group which, I regret to say, I should probably have asked to be degrouped because I do not intend to follow the debate so far, except to say that it highlights the tremendous importance of what is set up as the learning centre part of the memorial and learning centre. It reinforces my view that what is on the table at the moment simply goes no way to meeting the kind of description that my noble friend Lord Pickles and others have spoken about.

Before coming to my amendment, I quote the last sentence of Britain’s Promise to Remember in recommendation 1:

“But it is also clear that a memorial on its own is not enough and that there must be somewhere close at hand where people can go to learn more”.


That vividly shows the commission’s view. It did not in any way want to see what it saw as a very long development in recommendation 2 that needed to be thought about. Would there be enough money to do the things it wanted to do? All sorts of things had to be developed in a flexible way.

The purpose of my amendment is to try to end—or come close to ending—this Committee’s deliberations on a positive note rather than a negative one. As the Committee will know, I have proposed two amendments before, and I raised a lot of questions in them and made a lot of points. The first one particularly emphasised the differences between what was in the commission’s report and was accepted and what is on the table today, and the second one questioned the reasons why the commission’s recommendation immediately to form a management body has been rejected and is still under consideration. It seems to me that such a body could have done a deal of good work over the last few years.

Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Verdirame Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I would like to say a few words about the learning centre. Like other noble Lords who have spoken before, such as the noble Lords, Lord Goodman and Lord Mann, my main concern is about the content. Holocaust education in this era faces two key challenges. The first, as others have remarked, is that we are going through a period of rising anti-Semitism. This is a fact that should give us all pause to reflect on how effective our education about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism has been. How can anti-Semitism still be on the rise, and how do we explain the fact that it is rising among people who consider themselves progressive, and who may often be genuinely progressive in a lot of ways? If we do not use this occasion to ask ourselves these difficult and uncomfortable questions, we risk building a monument to our failure.

While Cynics may have been wrong to think that virtue cannot be taught, it is true that some virtues are more difficult to teach than others, and freedom from anti-Semitism is one of them. As the Oxford physicist David Deutsch suggested, the reason may be that we too often tend to think of anti-Semitism as another type of racist hatred or xenophobia. Anti-Semitism may cause both those things, but it is fundamentally different. Professor Deutsch argues:

“It is a more dangerous moral pathology, centred on the need to preserve the legitimacy of hurting Jews for being Jews”.


This moral pathology has emerged over centuries and not just in the Christian West, by the way. The reason why so many of our Jewish friends and colleagues consider certain criticisms of Israel as anti-Semitic is not because they think that it is anti-Semitic to criticise Israeli policies, but because some of those criticisms are so disproportionate, absurd and obsessive that what drives them is precisely the irrational impulse to want to find some justification for violence against Jews. Unless people are made aware of this distinctive and uniquely irrational mode of thinking and acting that is the essence of anti-Semitism, many people, including some of the highly educated, will continue to fall victim to it.

The second challenge for the learning centre is another contemporary malaise: conceptual overreach. Another Oxford professor, John Tasioulas, has argued that this is a particular form of degradation of the public sphere, whereby core ideas—such as human rights, the rule of law and now genocide—are put through

“a process of expansion or inflation”

in the mistaken belief that expanding their meaning and overusing them is a form of progressive politics. It is not; it is the opposite. It blurs important moral distinctions, discredits ideas and corrupts public argument. How will the learning centre teach a new generation about the genocide of European Jewry at a time when the word “genocide” is losing its meaning and being instrumentalised even in the most august international fora? In fact, it is perversely and cruelly being used to find excuses for—guess what?—violence against Jews.

Last April I was privileged to be invited by the Rwandan Government to attend, in Kigali, the 30th commemoration of the genocide of the Tutsis. I began my career in the late 1990s interviewing Rwandan exiles in Nairobi, where the community included survivors of the genocide but also some perpetrators. The latter, thankfully, were dispatched to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda shortly thereafter and convicted. I was impressed by the way Rwanda commemorates the genocide and educates about it. No one made grotesque comparisons with other situations. There was no mission creep, and no attempt to use that occasion as an opportunity to raise other causes, however worthy. They were focused on the commemoration of that tragic event, and theirs was a genuine and sombre attempt to understand how it could happen.

Looking at the objectives of the Holocaust Memorial Charitable Trust did not allay my concerns about conceptual overreach. The objectives include goals such as promoting human rights throughout the world, promoting equality and diversity, and furthering charitable purposes relating to persecution more generally. All are wonderful goals, but a learning centre that seeks to teach everything will teach nothing. I echo the questions from the noble Lord, Lord Austin, to the Minister, who I hope can reassure us that there will be no such mission creep, that the learning centre will maintain focus and that it will have the moral courage to reach out to those communities in our society where we know that anti-Semitism is prevalent and where the need for Holocaust education is the greatest.