Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I want to make it abundantly clear that I favour an appropriate and uniquely British monument to the Holocaust in the heart of Westminster, and a properly sized learning centre somewhere nearby with the capability of telling the whole story of the Holocaust and of Jews in Britain and the ability to operate online to tackle the resurgence of Jewish hatred we have seen in the last few months. Never before has education about the eradication of 6 million Jews been more essential as we see frightening calls for a new Holocaust.

However, I am afraid this is an appalling little Bill. It was appalling when the last Government introduced it and it is still an appalling Bill today. That is no fault of the Minister, for whom I have the highest regard.

This memorial fails every recommendation of the Holocaust Commission and instead foists on us a grossly inadequate edifice that does no justice to the past Holocaust nor the threats of a new one, designed by a discredited architect, David Adjaye—a grotesque design already rejected by Canada, and dumped on a completely unsuitable site in London that was never considered by the commission in 2015. At least the Canadians now have a decent one on a one-acre site next to their war museum. It is three stories high and all above ground—not a pokey little thing buried in a bunker in a small park.

The commission wanted something uniquely British. Instead, we get the same inexplicably obscure but uniquely ugly design that Canada rejected. In February 2019, on the BBC, Mr Adjaye justified the ugliness of it by saying that

“disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking”

of the memorial. What? What an appallingly feeble excuse for bad design in the wrong place. Key to the thinking should be educating people on the evil of National Socialism as practised by Hitler and the Nazi regime.

When the commission reported way back in 2015, the conventional view was that all education and learning had to be in a physical building. All that has now changed following Covid. The only point of a physical museum is if there are physical objects to display and the learning cannot be imparted in any other way but by a physical presence. Look at the brilliant display at the Imperial War Museum, which I visited recently. Of course it has the usual photos and videos we have all seen, but it has some physical artefacts: the striped suits, some shoes, jewellery, and a good mock-up of the railway wagons used to transport Jews to the extermination camps. But the bunker here will just have copies of the same posters and videos we have all seen before, because all physical artefacts have already been scooped up by physical museums.

DLUHC, as it then was, boasted to the House of Commons Select Committee that the exhibition would be

“a powerful audio-visual exhibition that will set out the events of the Holocaust from British perspectives, historically, politically and culturally”.

But why would children and young people—or, indeed, anyone—want to visit a building to see things they can get better on their mobile phones and iPads? How many busloads of children will come from Scotland and Wales, or even the English regions, to look at a video show with nothing new in it? How many would visit the Natural History Museum, the British Museum, the Churchill War Rooms or even this place if all they could see in these magnificent buildings were some posters and videos rather than physical artefacts?

Adjaye’s justification for these fins is that the 22 gaps between them represent the 22 countries from where Jews were plucked to be exterminated. That is a completely irrelevant number that no one has heard of before. Why not one fin representing the country that did it, Nazi Germany? Why not 20 fins, the number of concentration camps, or six, the number of large extermination camps? Many numbers could be chosen but they are all irrelevant except one: 6 million—6 million Jews exterminated. That is the figure that needs to be represented in any memorial, and it is more important today than ever before.

On 27 January 2019, the BBC published a poll showing that 8.5 million Brits—19% of our population—thought that fewer than 2 million Jews had been exterminated. Some 2.2 million people—5% of our population—believed there never was a Holocaust at all. There are frightening, deliberate lies being spread by social media, and that level of Holocaust denial is increasing rapidly. We need not an old-fashioned, analogue bunker in the ground but a large, modern, high-tech, 24/7, digital educational operation, attached to the Imperial War Museum, which would be keen to house it, pumping out the true facts of the last Holocaust and rebutting the lies on social media about Jews in this country and abroad.

I am proud of what Jews have delivered for this country over the past 500 years despite bias and discrimination. Now they are under attack like never before. The Holocaust is being denied, and this failed Adjaye design does nothing to educate millions of people on the horrors of it nor counteract the present threats of a new Holocaust. That is why this Bill fails all the tests of the original commission.