Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome my noble friend Lord Khan to his present position—not that I envy him in any way, having his first parliamentary exercise as a Minister to be to take this Bill through. I am very pleased, too, to stand here as a member of the Labour Party, now in government, and fully committed to delivering a national Holocaust memorial and learning centre. However, as we have heard in this debate, we should not automatically think that the two have to be next to or part of each other. I am told that Committee will be an opportunity to debate relevant concerns. I hope we do debate them, as I certainly have concerns.

I stand by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for her noble campaign to activate many of us and to increase our awareness of the nuances, as well as the broad themes that are in play, in discussing the Bill. Certainly, she has revealed to us the need to have more exact information about the location. I am confused by the various statistics aired in this debate. I stand with the noble Lords, Lord Carlile and Lord Lisvane, in the concerns they have expressed about security. It really will be a serious issue; who can doubt that? To have the centre in close proximity to Parliament raises its own questions.

My own feelings centre on the nature of education. What is education? It is the transmission of information, but it is more than that. We are dealing with a country that, at any odd moment, displays ugly anti-Semitism almost at will. How do we get into the genetic make-up of a whole culture in order to change that?

I can refer to the way that my own inner being, and my own unconscious biases and prejudices, have been helped and developed to get to a better place. I have had the privilege of living in north-west London. I remember sitting in a room in Hendon with a rabbi who had been a soldier in the Second World War. He was a chaplain, and he was with his unit as it liberated Belsen. The commanding officer said to him, “This one is yours, padre”, as all those emaciated people behind those fences just posed—well, did they? Did they paint a picture for us? It is beyond that. I do not even know how to find words to express what comes into my being—not my head, my being, my everything—when you see the capability of humanity to impose, extract and shape that and hand it over to a padre in that sort of way.

I remember being with my wife in the Odeon cinema in Golders Green when the first showing of “Schindler’s List” took place. In the darkened interior of the cinema—how many of us non-Jews were there, I do not know— I cannot forget the sobbing and weeping that was so audible as the film presented its narrative.

I also had the opportunity to visit the Kinloss synagogue in north London and other synagogues for mid-week meetings with pensioners and the like. These meetings were always better than the Methodist ones, by the way, because I invariably came away with a bottle of whisky, which never happened—nobody knows about that—in the Methodist equivalent. It was through informal conversations with people ready to show me the numbers engraved on their arms that trust was generated, and those circumstances made me aware of what we somehow have to achieve through whatever it is we call education on these matters in a broader sense.

We lived on a street with secular and religious Jews. We had reform, we had Masorti, liberal, United Synagogue; we had the lot. I remember being in a campaign for the eruv that they wanted to put around to enable people to push prams to the synagogue on a Saturday. On the Sunday that we left Golders Green, my wife and I were invited to have a little drink, a parting gift, with friends Sol and Claire, an ex-tailor from the East End of London. When we got there after my last morning service, what did we find? The entire street was there. The toast was, “To our Methodist rabbi”. I honestly want to convey to the House the feeling that, unless things happen in those profound ways to people’s whole aspect and understanding of themselves, education will not have happened. Putting up what I hear is to be put up does not get near that. I stand here just to offer this testimony, knowing of my inadequacy as far as most of this debate goes.