Holocaust Memorial Day

Angus Brendan MacNeil Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Graham Evans]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman. He raises an important point relating to his constituency. My understanding is that money is available for students from across the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland, to attend Auschwitz. I believe that the Treasury has allocated funds for that exercise.

I have also been privileged to meet survivors and listen to first-hand accounts, but they are harder and harder to find as time takes its toll. As time goes on, it is essential that we work harder than ever to ensure that people remember the holocaust; we cannot allow it to become a remote and distant memory for future generations.

So why should this debate be taking place here in the Chamber today? Those who fail to learn the lessons of history risk repeating them. The holocaust was not the first genocide; nor, sadly, was it the last. That murder by the state on an industrial scale occurred in what was one of the most modern and, arguably, civilised nations in the world at the time. Anti-Semitism, homophobia and prejudice still exist all across the world. Wherever there is unrest, economic difficulty or social imbalance, it is human nature to search for a group to blame. As the global economy falters, those conditions exist across the world, in Europe and even in Great Britain today.

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

I have been to Cambodia and Rwanda, and what the hon. Gentleman has been saying is particularly worrying. Having seen those countries, and knowing the history of Europe, I cannot say with certainty that such things will not happen again. Today gives us an important opportunity to express our best hope that they will not, and to alert people to the dangers, but does the hon. Gentleman know of any ways in which we could act in a stronger, more robust, manner to lessen the chances of them happening again?

[Graham Evans]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. It is only 15 years since the genocide in Rwanda, in the mid-1990s, when the whole world stood by and allowed it to happen. He is right to say that we need to remain vigilant in relation to Rwanda and other countries.