Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan: 80th Anniversary

Lizzi Collinge Excerpts

Tuesday 6th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Lizzi Collinge (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Lab)]

As I reflect on VE day and the celebration of victory over fascism in Europe, it strikes me that the war effort was one of common endeavour by ordinary people such as my grandad, who was a translator at Bletchley Park, and Richard Brock, who, when I met him last year, was 100 years young. Richard was one of the men who liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

To sit with someone who had known that horror at first hand truly was a privilege, and it was a privilege to pass on my personal thanks on behalf of a survivor’s family. That is because my friend Krysh had a Polish grandma, and she survived Belsen. After her liberation, she came to Britain and settled here. The rest, as they say, is history. Except it is not just history, is it? It is not something that we can bring out to look at on special occasions and congratulate ourselves on beating fascism before putting it away until the next anniversary. It did not start with the camps, did it? It never does. No, it was more insidious than that.

It was a slow and constant poisoning of minds by people intent only on power. It was a setting up of different groups as scapegoats. It was the use of pseudoscience to back up an ideology of racism and eugenics. It was the use of propaganda to turn people into caricatures and the use of the press to create a narrative of blame. It was the turning of ordinary people on their neighbours. It was taking the propensity of humans to group together and turning that into a sinister tribalism. Why look to the difficult solutions to complex problems when people can simply blame the groups, over there, that they have been taught over many years to hate and fear? In the ’20s and ’30s, it was the Jews, the Gypsies, the gays and the disabled. It was the intellectuals and the trade unionists. It was anyone who challenged that narrative of hate.

So who is it today? Fascism did not start with the camps, and the ideas underpinning fascism are not artefacts of history. I end with the plea that we do not treat fascism and tyranny as an historical artefact, and that we remember that they are a living possibility—even now, even here. The overthrow of fascism is not a bauble to admire once a year. Rather, it is a reminder that we should never let it get that far ever again, that we must be on our guard and that we should never let it flourish.

[Several hon. Members rose—]