Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

That was a perfectly proper and normal process, as established in the planning rules. Of course the Government can do that, through the proper process, and have a public inquiry; that is a normal thing. What the council cannot do is meet as a group to decide on planning permissions. The reason why the law was changed was because of a number of dodgy decisions taken in the 1960s for political and personal financial reasons. That is why it is not possible to discuss planning applications.

These things are taken completely independently. There have been some ingenious arguments put forward, which I have enjoyed, but, essentially, it is the same thing: “We want a different planning system. We don’t want one that applies to the rest of the country. We want a planning application that applies to where we live, and we want to decide it because we’re in the House of Lords”. That is an untenable position and one that is difficult to justify outside. This Bill does not seek to grant planning permission; it does not take it into the planning permission. Nothing in this process relates to town and country planning. It just opens the possibility for town and country planning to be applied to this process.

The Imperial War Museum is a key partner in this. It supports the memorial in the Victoria Tower Gardens. Regarding UNESCO, we should remember that this is not in its area; it is outside it. We are perhaps entitled to get the opinion of Historic England. I am sure that it was just because of a question of time—she was coming to the end of her time—that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, did not give Historic England’s view; of course, it looked at this matter specifically. It said that

“the proposals would not significantly harm the Outstanding Universal Value of the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey including Saint Margaret’s Church World Heritage Site”.

We are grateful for that but, ultimately, something such as this has to be determined by the Minister. The Government, who are responsible for our security, have to make that decision in conjunction with the security forces.

I am going to sit down now, but I do hope that we can conduct this in a slightly more comradely fashion. In 1992, during my first appearance on a committee, I accused George Mudie, who was then a Member of Parliament—and quite a good friend of mine, actually—of issuing weasel words. I was hauled over the coals for that, and I had to make a full and frank apology. But, apparently, your Lordships’ House, which is supposed to be the dignified end of the constitution, can serve words such as these without it even raising an eyebrow.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 21. I have a few straightforward questions for the Minister on the so-called planning process. First, I say to my noble friend Lord Pickles, in the most comradely and indeed cuddly way, that I think he misunderstood what my noble friend Lord Robathan was saying. I do not take my noble friend Lord Robathan’s comments to mean that the Labour and Tory groups met in some secret cabal or caucus to sabotage the planning application. I took them to mean that, when they met in the council properly to determine it, all the Tories and Labour people voted against it, perfectly legitimately—not in some secret caucus.

The questions I have for the Minister are straightforward. First, will he confirm that the designated Minister to decide on the three options that he mentioned last week will be from his own department? Will it be Matthew Pennycook MP, Jim McMahon OBE MP, Rushanara Ali MP, Alex Norris MP or the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage? Secondly, will he state how their independence will be judged?

I must tell the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, that in my opinion there is not the slightest snowflake’s chance in Hades that the Government will again send this to Westminster City Council for a planning application. They will go for the other two internal options. In that regard, will the Minister set out exactly how the round-table proposal will work? Who will be invited, how many round tables will there be and what written evidence will they accept?

Finally, there is a suggestion for written representations as another option. Will he or the designated Minister accept and give full consideration to all written representations received, just like the planning application to Westminster City Council? If the designated Minister rejects them, will his or her justification be set out in full?

For the benefit of any present who may wish to give the Minister any advisory notes from the Box, I repeat: who will be the designated Minister? How will the department determine his or her independence? How will the round tables work? Will written representations permit all the representations that Westminster City Council receives? How will they be assessed? Will the designated Minister set out in full the reasons for rejecting written arguments, if the decision to go ahead is taken?

There you go, my Lords: two and a half minutes, which is a record for me in this Committee.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, the amendments in this group, as with many of the amendments that have been tabled to the Bill, relate to the planning process and the impact that the new memorial and learning centre will have on security and other buildings in the area.

Amendment 21, from my noble friend Lady Fookes, asks for a new planning application because of new information on security and environmental impacts. We have discussed these issues in an earlier group and I do not intend to revisit those arguments in my remarks here.

The amendment also seeks to place an expanded notification duty on the applicant. I do not support the amendment, but I am sure that the Minister will take this opportunity to reassure my noble friend Lady Fookes and her cosignatories that appropriate notifications will, as always, be sent in the appropriate manner to the appropriate persons.

Amendment 34, in the name of my noble friend Lord Howard of Rising, seeks to require another impact assessment before this project. I know that my noble friend’s concerns are deeply felt, but I do not feel that we need to do a further impact assessment. We need to make progress on the delivery of this landmark memorial, which was promised to this country so very long ago.

Amendment 38 seeks to give Parliament the final decision on planning. Parliament will have a say once the Bill is passed. We are not certain that bringing the proposition to Parliament once again is at all appropriate.

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[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My answer to that is that there will be green spaces. Some 90% of the park will still be green spaces. The whole project is 7.5% of the park. This has been discussed extensively in previous groups. There has been no lack of analysis, consultation and scrutiny in the process that has led us to this point. I accept, of course, that the process has not brought a complete consensus, but are we really expected to believe that, by repeating the process that began all those years ago, we would find a solution that would somehow meet everyone’s expectations? That is simply not realistic.

Our objective is widely shared, including by a succession of Prime Ministers and party leaders. Earlier this afternoon I was watching numerous Prime Ministers, from John Major to Gordon Brown, Theresa May, David Cameron and Tony Blair, all with democratic mandates and all giving strong support to this project. Numerous Prime Ministers and party leaders have shared widely their support to create a national memorial to the Holocaust, with an integrated learning centre, in a prominent location. An excellent design meeting our objectives has been put forward and awaits a decision on the planning application.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I detect that the Minister is in his peroration so I am grateful for him allowing me to intervene. He answered straightforwardly one of the questions that I posed—whom the designated Minister would be—but there are two others that he has not. He has made it clear that the designated Minister would have three options. He has been briefed by his civil servants that there are three options you can do. One is a full-scale planning application to Westminster City Council, which I believe will never happen. The second option was described by the Minister as a round table and the third was written representations to be received by the Minister. Clearly, the able civil servants in his department have invented those two other options. There must be a brief somewhere on what the round table and the written representations would do, and I would like to hear from the Minister, either today or at some time in the future, exactly what those other two options would involve.

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am not going to get involved in that. The reason why is that I am in no position to pre-empt what the designated planning Minister will do or the nature of his decision. That might require that the planning process is totally to be determined, and, within the options, he may have a particular focus on how he would like that exercised.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I am sorry but the Minister may have misunderstood me. I am not asking for a decision on which option he will go for; I am asking for the details of the possible options that he could decide on. It is perfectly legitimate to ask, if the Government are saying that one thing will be a planning application, another thing will be a round table and the third one will be written representations, what details would be required in the round table. We are perfectly entitled to know that. The Minister must have had a brief on what it would be about; the department cannot pluck those three options from thin air without giving Ministers details of how they would operate in reality. I do not want to know which one he will go for, of course, but I want to know how they might work.

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, it is perfectly reasonable of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, to ask that question, but information is available on the website of the planning casework unit; the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, has previously referred to it in this Committee. If it would help, we could send some more detail, in terms of where the website is and the address—as well as more details about the options that the designated Minister could pursue—to give the noble Lord more assurance around and confidence in the procedure. That would be no problem.

There is nothing to be gained by turning the clock back to 2015. All that this would achieve is to delay the creation of a memorial by many years. Few Holocaust survivors, perhaps none at all, would live to see the project completed—

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Moved by

[Lord Blencathra]

32: 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 Nazi genocide of the Jews and antisemitism.”

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 32 in my name, on this occasion, I will be a wee bit longer than two minutes. I suggest that this is the most important amendment we will consider since, no matter where this thing is built, it is vital that it concentrates on the Shoah and antisemitism, and nothing else.

I want to say that it was a most powerful speech from the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, who has just left the Room. Some of the rest of us may be accused of being party political; he certainly was not, and I found his contribution quite devastating.

It was argued in this Committee last week that the only exhibits or information to be included in the learning centre would be on the Holocaust or Shoah. It was said that a group of historical experts had asserted that. Well, if that is what they believe, they are being taken for mugs or have not read what the Government have said about the learning centre. Paragraph 3 of the Explanatory Notes for the Bill says:

“The Learning Centre’s exhibition will … help people understand the way the lessons of the Holocaust apply more widely, including to other genocides”.


Note the words “including to other genocides”.

In his winding-up speech at Second Reading on 4 September, the Minister said:

“The learning centre will provide the opportunity to learn about the Holocaust close to the memorial, helping people to better understand how the lessons of the Holocaust apply more widely, including to other genocides”.—[Official Report, 4/9/24; col. 1228.]


I prefer to believe the written Explanatory Notes on the Bill and the word of the Minister rather than the wishful thinking of a bunch of, no doubt, distinguished historians.

Can we all agree that it is government policy that “other genocides” will be included? What are all these other genocides? In a speech to the Council of Europe commemorating the 100th anniversary of the communist revolution in Russia, I said that we should commemorate 100 years of socialism and all the countries in which socialist policies had been tried. That was the Soviet Union, Germany, China, Cambodia, North Korea, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Ethiopia, Bulgaria, East Germany, Cuba, Angola, Albania, Laos, Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, Chile and others.

I then went on to say that we should list the 130 million people it slaughtered by genocide, democide and politicide as well as the countless millions tortured in gulags and forced labour camps. The principal countries and parties to showcase for genocide would be the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which killed 35 million people. The National Socialist Workers Party—that is, Hitler—killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust and 20 million others in World War II. The Communist Party of China killed 65 million. The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot killed 2 million. North Korea killed 3.6 million. Ethiopia killed 2 million. Yugoslavia killed 1.5 million. Then, if we add up Angola, Bulgaria, Laos, Zimbabwe and all the others, we get another 1.7 million slaughtered in socialist regimes.

Of course we have other evil genocides from non-socialist regimes. The Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides, all carried out by the Ottoman Empire, add up to 2.175 million. The Indonesian genocide adds up to about 1.5 million. The Guatemalan or Maya genocide killed 250,000; the Rwanda genocide killed 800,000, the Darfur genocide 300,000, and the Bosnia and Srebrenica genocide, 8,000. The Rohingya genocide—which continues, I suppose—is at 40,000. With the Uyghur genocide in China, we have no idea, but it could be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. In brief, that is an awful lot of genocides, with almost 140 million people slaughtered since 1914. After every one we always say it must never happen again, but it always does.

So which of these genocides will the learning centre highlight as “the other genocides”? It seems that only four are being considered: Cambodia, of 2 million; Rwanda, of 800,000; Darfur, of 300,000; and Bosnia, of 8,000. That is a total of 3,108,000. They are horrendous in themselves, but represent only a tiny fraction of the more than 75 million killed in genocides since the end of the Second World War.

Where have these four suggested genocides emerged from? I shall take noble Lords through the timeline. The 2015 Holocaust Commission had two throwaway lines. In paragraph 10 it said:

“While the Holocaust was unprecedented and should never be seen as equivalent to other genocides, we see many of the same steps from prejudice to persecution in other atrocities, like those in Rwanda and Bosnia or the crimes of ISIL today”.


Noble Lords should note the words

“unprecedented and should never be seen as equivalent to other genocides”.

Then in paragraph 44 it said that

“one of the objectives of the Learning Centre would also be to help people understand the way the lessons of the Holocaust apply more widely, including to other genocides”.

Note that there was no suggestion whatever that there would be a display of other genocides.

In 2018, the department employed a company called Metaphor to design the interior of the learning centre and present a detailed plan to Westminster City Council. That is when the whole thing became transmogrified. In his submission, a Mr Stephen Greenberg, an expert on the Holocaust and of impeccable integrity, said in paragraph 13.1:

“Decisions on which communities, and how many we select are yet to be decided”.


But then in paragraph 18.4, in describing “the Void” he said:

“It is a space where we will also reflect on the murder of the millions of Cambodians by the Pol Pot regime, the millions of Rwandans murdered by the Interahamwe and the thousands of Muslim men and boys murdered in Bosnia”.


So much for it not being decided yet, as he said four pages earlier. The Holocaust Commission mentioned Rwanda, Bosnia and Islamic State, not having exhibits on them—and suddenly we get Cambodia added to this list from out of nowhere. Then this idea of adding more genocides got legs through the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

Holocaust Memorial Day came about because of the Stockholm declaration of January 2000, which was the outcome of the international forum convened in Stockholm in January 2000 and attended by 23 Heads of State or Prime Ministers and 14 Deputy Prime Ministers or Ministers. It said in articles 1 and 2:

“We, The High Representatives of Governments at the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, declare that … 1. The Holocaust (Shoah) fundamentally challenged the foundations of civilization. The unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning … 2. The magnitude of the Holocaust, planned and carried out by the Nazis, must be forever seared in our collective memory … The depths of that horror, and the heights of their heroism, can be touchstones in our understanding of the human capacity for evil and for good”.


Article 6 said:

“We share a commitment to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and to honour those who stood against it. We will encourage appropriate forms of Holocaust remembrance, including an annual Day of Holocaust Remembrance, in our countries”.


That was in 2000.

The Home Office then organised Holocaust Memorial Day from 2001 to 2005, when it created the charity the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and appointed the trustees. The trust has run it ever since and has been 75% funded since 2007 by the Minister’s own Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government; the funding amounted to £900,000 last year. The front page of the Holocaust Memorial Day website says in big letters:

“On Holocaust Memorial Day, we remember the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and the millions of people killed under Nazi persecution of other groups, and during more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur, and the Yazidi genocide”.


We should note that another one has been added—Darfur. Where did that come from? Who suggested adding Darfur to Holocaust Memorial Day?

The trust is run by a senior leadership team made up of eminent trustees of great ability and impeccable character, with my noble friend Lord Pickles as its honorary vice-president. But why on earth has the trust selected these four genocides to be commemorated along with the Shoah on Holocaust Memorial Day? They have nothing in common with the Holocaust. The Khmer Rouge wanted a classless society. In Rwanda, it was years of tribal hatred. Darfur was an ethnic war between black African farmers and nomadic Arabs. With Bosnia and Srebrenica, there was a religious war between Orthodox Serbs and Bosnian Muslims. The Holocaust was unique. The Holocaust Commission rightly said:

“The Holocaust is the product of an ideology. It was not a battle for land or power or even a grotesque response to perceived wrongdoing by Jewish people. It was rooted in an irrational hatred of Jews, for simply being born a Jew or of Jewish ancestry. Never before had a people been denied the right to life simply because of the crime of being born. It was, ultimately, a product of a thousand years of European antisemitism”.

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[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

I will certainly sit down.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I said at the beginning that I thought this was about the most important amendment we had; I am glad that I have, I think, been proved right. We have had a highly provocative, important debate on what the learning centre should be about. It has been stressed time and again that it should be about the Holocaust and antisemitism—nothing else.

I am grateful to all those of my noble friends who participated; to two highly distinguished Cross-Benchers, the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew; and the non-affiliated Peer who signed my amendment, the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame. He is a highly distinguished King’s Counsel who has led on many important cases in this country. I will forgive him for taking a brief from the ghastly Leigh Day firm; that was a cab rank thing, I suppose. He is also a professor of international law at King’s College. He rightly made the point that there will be controversy on what other groups are to be included; that point was picked up by my noble friend Lord Goodman, who supported my amendment and also made the point about there being a lot of controversy around what the other genocides are.

I think I would be right to say that probably every noble Lord in this place knows that what happened in Armenia 110 years ago, with 1 million Armenians slaughtered, was genocide. Some other countries in the world have said that, but no British Government have ever called it genocide because we are terrified that, if we call it genocide, Turkey and President Erdoğan—a big NATO member—will get terribly upset. Therefore, we do not call it genocide for wider geopolitical and military reasons; we have the same problem in trying to select various other genocides to attach here.

My noble friend Lady Fleet made a powerful speech on the antisemitism that she and her husband and family currently face. She rightly pointed out that the evil chant of “from the river to the sea” means the extermination of the Jews; she also made the point that the memorial and the learning centre must be about the Holocaust and antisemitism only.

The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, kept asking what the learning centre is about and what it is supposed to teach. If it is supposed to teach 2,000 years of Jewish history, you need something better than a few posters and videos in this little bunker; you need the giant campus that the Holocaust Commission proposed. Other Jewish organisations could have rooms there and you could have conferences. You would actually teach the 2,000-year history of Jewish life and the Holocaust in full detail.

The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, just made an intervention to say that his family fought the Germans. My uncles did as well, in the 51st Highland Division; they were captured at Saint-Valery and spent five years of the war in, I think, Stalag IV-D.

The noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, asked: who are the beneficiaries? He rightly pointed out it would be those wandering Jews from 1,300 BC and the exodus in Egypt to the present day; that is 3,300 years of Jews looking for a safe home somewhere in the world. He also made the point that this must be about the Shoah and nothing else.

The shadow Minister, my noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook, said that the point was to get the learning centre built so that the survivors of the Holocaust could see in their lifetime that we were commemorating the Holocaust. If I may say so, that is not the important point. The point is not, as was wrongly said in this Committee by a colleague, that this is for the benefit of the Jews. The whole point of the memorial and the learning centre is that it is for the tens of millions of people who deny that the Holocaust ever existed. The survivors of the Holocaust do not need to be told how bad it was—

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I am sorry but they have told me very strongly—and have done so over a number of years, as they have told the Minister now—that they would like to see it.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I accept that. Of course they would like to see it—I totally understand that; I am not dismissing their desire—but what is more important: placating and dealing with their desire, or addressing the millions of people who are calling for a new holocaust and denying that the last Holocaust ever existed? That concern must take priority over building something that is grossly inadequate to please the existing survivors. The Minister talked again about it communicating the value of Jewish life over 2,000 years. I simply make the point, again, that you cannot do that with this little bunker; you need a proper learning centre, which the original Holocaust Commission called for.

I cannot see how on earth you can put an exhibition in this bunker that has any relevance to what happened later in Darfur or to Pol Pot. There is nothing to learn about these genocides from what happened to the Jews.

The noble Lord pointed out that every Prime Minister has supported this. Those of us who have been in Parliament for many years have always formed the view that when both political parties agree on something, the public are being stuffed somewhere. When you have half a dozen Prime Ministers agreeing on something, you can again be sure to bet that the public are being misled. If one could, I would love to put down a Parliamentary Question asking how many times these former Prime Ministers have actually walked through Victoria gardens.

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[Lord Pickles (Con)]

I can do this in 20 seconds. All I am saying is that the Arrow Cross was murdering Jews in Hungary while Hitler was attempting the Munich putsch. The antisemitic laws were first introduced not at Nuremberg but in Hungary.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I will happily take that guidance from my noble friend; he may be absolutely right. I say to the Government Whip that we are not reliving the debate; I am trying to wind up the most important debate we have had in this Session over the last few days, and it is important to deal with the very important points raised by my noble friend Lord Pickles.

Okay, I am quite happy to remove the word “Nazi” and to say “Nazi-inspired”. We all agree that if we did not say “Nazi”, the amendment would be perfectly in order, because no one in this Room who supports the amendment is suggesting that we included the word “Nazi” to somehow exonerate Poland or the other countries that did it and are trying to concentrate just on a few hundred misguided people who wore the SS uniform. Of course that is not the case. We want this memorial and learning centre to be about everyone who exterminated Jews, whichever country they were in and whatever nationality they were.

That is the point made, in conclusion, by my noble friend Lord Robathan. He said that the whole point of the memorial is the genocide of the Jews by whoever did it. It has to be the Holocaust only, and none of the other four genocides suggested here has any relevance to the Holocaust. They should be ignored: the Holocaust and antisemitism only. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 32 withdrawn.