Holocaust Memorial Bill

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, many speakers have already referred to the mess we seem to have got into on this, and the number of speeches we have listened to bears witness to that. It also seems to me, as the debate grows close to its end, that there is a common belief in this Chamber that it would all be soluble and the project would be easily realised if we could just move everything to another site. I think that is completely wrong.

Take, for example, the Imperial War Museum, which came up a number of times and is often cited in this context. The noble Lord, Lord Black, speaking in a personal capacity, said this seems to be an excellent idea. As a south Londoner, I strongly disagree. I invite noble Lords who still possess an A-Z to take a look at the pages that cover Lambeth and Southwark. They will see that if you start at Lambeth Palace, which has its own gardens, and go east, you basically do not get anything until you are way east of Tower Bridge at Rotherhithe and Southwark Park, except for one small piece of green, which is the gardens of the Imperial War Museum. It seems to me that, far from being an obvious and simple site for a number of reasons, there is rightly going to be considerable opposition and unease at having built around with steel and effectively losing one of the few, tiny parts of green that the whole of Lambeth and Southwark possess.

I talk about the Imperial War Museum simply because that is the part of London that I spend a lot of my time in and know very well, but the point is much more general. If you look across the river to this side, you will see that as well as Victoria Tower Gardens, which noble Lords all know well and value, which is on our doorstep, there are a lot of pieces of green here. There is the wonderful St James’s Park. There are also Whitehall Gardens, Embankment Gardens, which I love, with its playground and Vincent Square. Would those be fine? If we put the memorial there, would that solve everything? I beg to disagree. The point is that any green space in any part of London is going to have all sorts of pressures upon it, and you cannot simply say “Don’t put it in Victoria Tower Gardens. Let’s just move it. That will solve the problem”.

The other thing that I was slightly taken aback by during the debate is the idea that the security problems mean that we should put the memorial somewhere else and that if we put it in another site, there will not be an issue. I think that if we had been having a debate like this nine years ago, we would not have spent as much time on security. The awful 10 months we have just completed have made this an issue in a way that it was not when this was first discussed. After all, this has been a period in which the Wiener Holocaust Library has been vandalised, and the Anne Frank statue in Amsterdam has been vandalised twice, so there is an issue. It is an issue that we must face wherever we think about putting the memorial and learning centre, but it seems to me that, first of all, as Bob Blackman MP said in the other place, the threat to any memorial is not an argument for why the memorial is not needed, but the opposite. It is an argument for why the memorial is needed. I certainly feel that it is and that successive Prime Ministers have been correct in feeling this.

Whether or not the memorial is in Victoria Tower Gardens, Westminster has surely to be the place that can offer security as well as being a place where we make a statement. I am sorry to keep harping on about the Imperial War Museum, which I adore, but it is not the same. Westminster is the centre of London, and if we want to make this statement and have this memorial, the real centre of London is where it belongs. This is a place which knows about security. I am deeply impressed by how well we manage to bring thousands of people through this precinct day after day.

Finally, I feel listening to this that the memorial and the learning centre are quite rightly separated in discussion and that that is probably somewhere where a lot of thought is needed, but I feel strongly that we are kidding ourselves if we think that everything will be fine if we just look for a brand-new site somewhere open and away from Westminster.