Holocaust Memorial Bill

Debate between Jon Trickett and Peter Bottomley

2nd reading
Wednesday 28th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

After 27 years in this place, I suppose I should never be surprised about the direction in which debates go, but it is slightly unseemly that we are spending so much time talking about such an emotive matter, down to the location of a particular monument. I understand entirely the views of local people, but this is a national—indeed, international—centre of democracy, which has world importance. Of course local residents matter, but so does the site itself, which has been here for centuries.

I will make a case for the location that the Government propose, but first let me reflect that today’s debate takes place in the shadow of the most vile and appalling event: the unspeakable capacity of human beings to inflict the kinds of activities carried out by the Nazis against the Jews. Part of our debate needs to reflect upon that, as well as looking at local issues.

There is no doubt that a memorial is well overdue, but the Minister may well feel that some of the discussion about location and the nature of the monument is unseemly. I urge the Government to reflect carefully on the debate, and to try to get the discussion about where it is and how it is constructed out of here and into a place where a consensus can be arrived at.

In the explanatory notes to the Bill, the Government say the memorial

“will help people understand the way the lessons of the Holocaust apply more widely, including to other genocides.”

That makes me think of racism, which takes many different forms. For example, the slave trade is a great stain on our nation, and on other nations too. There are families and institutions that benefit from the wealth that originated from that horrible trade to this very day. Why do I mention that? I mention it because Members of the House, who may have stood in the very place where I am standing now, fought against slavery, and it was in this House that the anti-slavery legislation was passed. We built an anti-slavery monument. Where did we build it? We built it next to our Parliament, in the very location now proposed.

As other Members have said, the sculpture of the Burghers of Calais, an amazing monument to the human spirit, is in the same park, as well as a statue that is a tribute to the suffragettes. Where else would we put a memorial to what happened in the holocaust but alongside our Parliament, in the same place as those other sculptures?

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

I am enjoying the hon. Gentleman’s speech. The answer to his question is that the holocaust memorial, preferably without the basement box, could be put where the Buxton family memorial was put, which was in Parliament Square. It does not have to be in Victoria Tower gardens.

[Jon Trickett]

I thank the Father of the House, who I always listen to with respect. He is widely respected, but on this matter he may be wrong. I occasionally go to the anti-slavery monument and to look at the Burghers of Calais, which is an amazing sculpture. I then sometimes quietly go and sit on one of the benches, watch the river go by and think about the struggles for emancipation over the centuries, so many of which happened in this very building. I am not sure that putting a monument of the kind we are talking about in Parliament Square, surrounded as it is by traffic, is necessarily conducive to the quiet reflection that I and many others experience in the park.

I want to reflect on antisemitism, which was the root of the holocaust, and on my family’s history. I have never spoken about this before, either in public or in private, but it has been on my mind throughout my life and I want to go through some issues, because antisemitism is on the rise. It has long disfigured so many parts of our western European culture, as well as parts of our nation. It is a vile, centuries old, unforgiveable hatred that gave rise to the most appalling crime here in Europe in the last century. As I have said, we all still live in its shadows.

Fascism and the holocaust occurred in Germany, but we must never pretend that antisemitism is solely restricted to that nation. I wish to reflect on the lives of previous generations of my family and on what I have seen. My ancestors escaped antisemitic pogroms not in Germany, but in Tsarist Russia. They came to Britain on their way to the United States. They stopped off in London—the great port of London—first. In Victorian times, Britain welcomed asylum seekers—Jews escaping the tyranny of the time. It is hard to imagine whether that could happen today. Although that is not the point that I wish to make, it is important to reflect on that.

As I said, my family were on their way to America from what is now Poland. They were heading for Liverpool to get the boat across to New York and to freedom, as they saw it. They passed through Leeds. The older generation had by then become aged and infirm, so it was left to my grandmother, the youngest daughter, to stay and care for them—that was the tradition. The rest went on to Liverpool and then to Chicago. I have cousins who finally arrived in the west, in California. It is odd in a way to reflect that those cousins have almost circumnavigated the globe across four generations of my family.

Let me focus on the Leeds part of the family. They were hard-working cobblers—boot and shoe makers. They worked in a small place next to the synagogue on North Street, Leeds. There was a great Jewish community there. Although it was a tight-knit working class community, I heard many stories of harassment and racism, including violent attacks. The housing conditions were appalling—three generations living in slum housing, sharing one or, if they were lucky, two bedrooms. My grandparents had three children, one of whom was my mother. They lived in similar conditions. The house that I was brought up in was declared a slum and cleared. They were the generations of people who were building a life here.

My grandmother regularly told me that she lived in fear of the pogroms, from which she, her parents and grandparents had suffered in Russia. She said to me, “Here Jon, I need to tell you something. Whenever anyone unknown knocks on your door, you kid to be daft.” That might not mean much to Members in this place, but what she meant was to pretend to be stupid if somebody in a shirt and tie—a bit like I am dressed today—knocks on the door. In other words, do not comply with the wishes of strangers, especially those who look like they are in authority, because they may well be representatives of a hostile force. That was her experience. She had a lifelong fear of strangers and of authority. Perhaps it was just one of her foibles, I do not know. Equally, though, it might have reflected a part of the wider Jewish experience.

Before the second world war, a stereotypical English gentleman who had attended Winchester College, a public school, launched the British fascist party. He was supported by a section of the establishment as well as by people from all sectors of society. This was Oswald Mosley. He decided to lead his blackshirts through the Jewish quarters in Leeds, where my family lived. It was a naked attempt to mobilise antisemitic sentiments to distract residents from the post-1929 depression and the conditions that prevailed in Leeds at the time.

As a Leeds-born citizen who eventually become leader of that great city’s council, I am proud to tell the House that Mosley was refused permission to march through the Jewish areas. He did, however, rally his supporters on Holbeck Moor, in south Leeds, not far from where I came to live. Thirty thousand Jewish people turned out to resist the fascists. Jewish and gentile, socialists and communists, Liberals and Tories, trade unionists and fair-minded citizens, community groups and others rallied against Mosley. There was a battle and Mosley retired injured.

Members of my family were there. My mother and our family talked about that victory, but we did not fool ourselves that antisemitism had been quelled. Then came the second world war and the ghastly news of the concentration camps, which I imagine even today chills the bones of all of us in this House.

I do not want to exaggerate. Leeds is a tolerant place. Most people would say, “Live and let live”. That is the kind of people they are in West Yorkshire where I come from. When I was at school in the ‘50s and ‘60s, we lived on the edge of a large Jewish community. We got on pretty well, and I do not mean to say that the school was a bad place at all, but there were antisemitic actions, language and bullying in that school. I am not a violent man—my mother taught me to believe in non-violence—but I will not hide the fact that at times there were fights and there was resistance to the antisemites at the margins of the school, all motivated by anti-Jewish racism.

As I entered my teens, my mother began to say to me, “Let’s get out of here.” She wanted me to go to Israel to be on a kibbutz. The kibbutz seemed to offer a different way of living communally, inspired perhaps by some notions of common ownership, mutual endeavour, equality and peace. We decided that I would go to live on a kibbutz, but then the six-day war happened, and in any case we needed me to go out to work and earn a living at 16. Thinking about the six-day war, it is probably worth recording that our family knew that people could disagree with an elected Government and its actions, but that that is not the same as hating a whole nation or even a race. We can clearly see today that there are many Israelis who oppose their Government, and no one would suggest that they are being antisemitic in doing so.

I come now to a distasteful few sentences. When I joined the Labour party in 1969, there were many working-class Jewish socialists in our part of Leeds, and I never witnessed any antisemitism in any of those meetings. However, and I regret to have to record this, when I entered my constituency as the MP, only 12 miles away from Leeds, I was subjected to the most shocking antisemitic comment by a party member. It was vile. Equally, though, I am pleased to record that the individual concerned was confronted by fellow members for his outburst and was told he must never come back to another meeting.

Let me turn to one further final anecdote. I was out canvassing not so long ago in my constituency, which is in the wonderful area of Wakefield, when a man who I knew had a reputation for being a Nazi approached me. He was a man who could not control his emotions, a man with extreme anger, and he told me he was going to fill the streets with “patriots”, as he called them, and that they would eliminate people such as me from the area and from the country. It was a terrifying moment, but the police decided to record it as a hate crime and I am glad to say that he was charged and pled guilty to an antisemitic hate crime in Leeds Crown Court.

I hope that the House will understand that I have spoken in this way in order to condemn with every single fibre in my body all forms of racism and antisemitism. The holocaust is an appalling crime against our common humanity. It is right that we pledge today never to forgive or forget what happened, and never to let down our guard for a moment—because, while antiracism is a powerful force, antisemitism is still there and needs to be resisted.