Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 4th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Fleet (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee but this is my first intervention on the Bill. I declare my interest as a former chairman of Arts Council London. I rise to speak to Amendment 29 and the consequential amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Blencathra.

I would like to put on record my admiration for the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and all the work that she has put into this extraordinary debate today. I have a few brief observations to add to the comprehensive remarks that my noble friend delivered just now with his customary eloquence and wisdom, with which I entirely agree. I support the analysis by several noble Lords of the problems of this site in Victoria Tower Gardens.

I must begin by saying that I am entirely in favour of a Holocaust memorial in central London. We all want present and future generations to recognise, understand and learn what the Holocaust was, why it happened and why it still matters. It is frightening that anti-Semitism is ever present. As my noble friend highlighted, a poll showed that more than 2 million people —about 5% of our population—believe that there never was a Holocaust at all. That figure is probably much higher now as a result of social media. Anti-Semitism must be a central element of whatever or wherever the learning centre is.

As Prime Minister in 2015, my noble friend Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton had a noble ambition when, with cross-party support, he announced details of his proposal. The memorial and learning centre would be world-class. My noble friends have already set out clearly what was promised and what will now be delivered. There is no doubt that the original ambition has been radically reduced as, now, the proposed learning centre would be just a few rooms, all digital. My noble friend Lady Bottomley once memorably described the learning centre as a “subterranean shoebox”.

Several eminent historians, including Sir Richard Evans, have pointed out that London’s contribution would be put to shame by what can be seen elsewhere in the world—indeed, in our own Imperial War Museum, which has been referred to already, and its Holocaust galleries. In preparation for today’s debate, I revisited the Holocaust galleries. They are indeed world-class: through more than 2,000 photos, books and letters, they tell individual stories of some of the 6 million Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust.

The first room is extraordinary. It introduces us, through home movies, music and photos, to Jewish families across Europe in the early 1930s. They are smiling and posing on graduation from school or university, at family weddings, skiing and playing table tennis. With the dark reality of what was to come, we then see personal possessions—a child’s teddy bear, a darning mushroom and sheet music—displayed in the large cabinets. A dozen or so spacious, themed rooms link events from the rise of Hitler through to the final solution. It is a profound, emotional and educational experience.

The proposed learning centre, squeezed into the very limited space of Victoria Tower Gardens, lacks this essential content and impact. Surely the Imperial War Museum, set in the verdant 14-acre Harmsworth Park just a mile from Westminster, is a potential alternative site for the Holocaust memorial and learning centre. The Victoria Tower Gardens site is totally inappropriate. As my noble friends have said, it has been criticised by UNESCO, Historic England and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, which rated it red—in other words, undeliverable. Victims of the Holocaust and survivors, as well as our future generations, deserve a world-class learning centre. That cannot be in Victoria Tower Gardens.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendments 29 and 31 in this group. My noble friend Lord Blencathra has, as my noble friend Lady Fleet just pointed out, spoken with great eloquence to them, but I have a few sweeping-up remarks to make about Amendment 31 and some tangential matters arising therefrom.

Before I speak to them, I owe the Committee an apology because I did not participate at Second Reading on 4 September last—I am afraid that I was abroad at the time—but I did make a submission to the Select Committee of your Lordships’ House on the Bill and appeared before it to plead my case. If I may, I will return to that in a minute or two.

Since I did not participate in the September debate, I should perhaps say a few words about where I stand on the principles of the Bill as a whole. I am not nihilistic. I reject the suggestion from my noble friend Lord Finkelstein that one is going to find objections to everything. I am very much in favour of a memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens. I am prepared to work and live with the design that people think is satisfactory.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I was half way through explaining my position on the proposals of the Bill. I believe that there should be a memorial to the Holocaust and that it should be in Victoria Tower Gardens. I would work with almost anybody regarding the design. I do not think that the present design is particularly attractive. I also support the proposal for a learning centre but have difficulty with putting that into Victoria Tower Gardens, for the reasons that have been given by my noble friend Lord Blencathra and the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone. That site is not suitable for the scale and importance of the task that it would be undertaking. That is the background to Amendments 29 and 30—the need for a campus and all the other things that have been mentioned.

Amendment 31 has a slight additional edge to it, because the Jewish Museum in Camden has closed due to a lack of funding. All its exhibits are now in storage. It might be worth while considering that this could be included in an overall context of a British-Jewish experience and a national, or London, Jewish museum. That is simply the background and purpose of Amendment 31: that this is included in any consideration of alternative sites.

My noble friend Lady Scott—I know she is “of Bybrook”—explained that we had to consider some of the tangential impacts. I will do that briefly now—again in support of the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone—because quite a lot of what is talked about on the tangential experience is based on poor evidence and soggy experience. Those of us who have offices in Millbank, as I do, see how very crowded the pavements and the areas outside are all the time—particularly in the summer, obviously, but nearly all the time. Obviously, there is a bus shelter for Transport for London. There are coach points where people come to hop on and hop off tourist buses, and where students are dropped for tours of Parliament, all of which are very worthy things. If you walk along there on an ordinary day, you will find that not only is the pavement crowded but, because of the black crash barrier, you have a choke point that makes it even more crowded before you can get to where you can turn right into the Victoria Tower Gardens or go straight on to Black Rod’s Garden entrance.

I raised this issue with the committee and I was ruled out of order. The committee said, in paragraph 56 of its report:

“These concerns do not confer an entitlement to be heard and … the Standing Orders do not confer on us any discretion to consider his petition”.


Of course, I accept the Standing Orders of your Lordships’ House, but we are now moving from the rather dry area of Standing Orders to the real world. What is going to happen in this area over the many years ahead? If an activity or something inside the periphery of the area—that is, inside the gardens—causes trouble, difficulties, problems or inconvenience in the immediate environment outside, that at least demands to be considered and weighed in the scale. I would therefore like to tackle that briefly now.

In his reply in the Second Reading debate, the Minister said:

“We estimate that there will be 11 coaches per day, using a proposed coach bay on a quieter section of Millbank”.—[Official Report, 4/9/24; col. 1225.]


I have done a bit of research, because I have been popping into coaches for the last few days to ask, “How many passengers do you carry?” The truth is that I have not found one that carries fewer than 55 or more than 70, so we have an average of probably around 60 or 65. Eleven coaches a day is 660 people. Are we going to do all this for 660 people? Surely not. The idea is that this should be much bigger than that. If we then ask what estimates are being given for the number of people, it comes out usually as between 3,000 and 4,000. That number means that you are going to need about 58 coaches a day. If you are open between 9 am and 4 pm with a line for a 45-minute tour of the building—that is, for seven hours—that will be eight coaches per hour: one every seven minutes. Those are the numbers that we are likely to have to face.

I am sure the Minister does not know anything about the 11 coaches per hour; he was given a speaking note by his official. I am not suggesting he made this up at all. However, we need to think more carefully about this, because at present, the footfall and the impact on the area is absolutely clearly underestimated. If I may just quote from his speaking note one more time, he suggested using a proposed coach bay on a “quieter section of Millbank”. I invite him to get his officials to take him to a quieter section of Millbank. There is no quieter section of Millbank—it is a main thoroughfare where traffic passes all the time. I hope we can get more clarity on what the tangential impact is likely to be in the areas around what is proposed.

I share the view that the learning centre is not in a good place. In my view, it is going to be born in the spirit of rancour, whereas it surely should be born in the spirit of remembrance and healing. I hope that the Minister will be able to demonstrate that the Government are listening to all the points being made, and we do not just have a situation of “Put the pedal to the metal and get this thing done as quickly as possible”.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My noble friend mentioned the Jewish Museum in Camden, which has closed down. Is he aware that it says that it has 28,000 items and artefacts—including Jewish art, and examples showing the Jewish way of life going back centuries—in storage? Can he understand why, on the one hand, we have plans for this learning centre in Victoria gardens that will have no artefacts while, on the other, we have a closed-down museum with 28,000 artefacts looking for a home? Can the Government explain why on earth they are unable to marry them up and put the two together in a big, proper museum and learning centre, as the Holocaust Commission recommended?

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

Well, my Lords, that just shows that you should never speak after my noble friend Lord Blencathra, because of course he is right. I hope I made it clear that I thought the consideration of alternative sites should include the idea that we should have a national Jewish museum, which would pick up the 28,000 items, the number of which I was not aware.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, had there been time yesterday, we would have disaggregated this group because it covers three enormous topics that are very different, and I will not have time to say everything that I wanted to. I will start with the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, which is perhaps the most obvious and sensible of all of them. I call them over and under. If we stick to over and avoid under, nearly all the problems are solved—in other words, a memorial overground, and a learning centre somewhere else. That would avoid all the complications and costs of excavating Victoria Tower Gardens and the disruption and damage. Moreover, apparently the learning centre will have only digital and audio material in it, so why not just send us round the country, in whatever way can be done technologically these days, rather than bringing people to London?

I turn to the issue of endowment—what is in the learning centre and what it is supposed to do. The inadequacy of Holocaust education, which is well known, can be seen on the streets of London every week and on our campuses. Young people who have had some education about the Holocaust at school cannot make the connection between that and the vicious hatred of Israel today, the attacks on the survival of Jewish people, the resurgence of Nazi language and images, and the violence we find against Jewish people as they go about their businesses or go to synagogue. That is because of the failing of Holocaust education in two respects. First, it places the hatred of Jews in a box, something that was the exclusive province of the Nazis 90 years ago and ended at the end of the Second World War. The planned learning centre will compound that.

The other failing is the presentation of many genocides as if they had anything in common. The messages coming from the learning centre, as far as one can tell, will be “Do not be a bystander” and “Hatred is what brought on the Holocaust and other genocides”. That serves as an obfuscation and diversion of blame. It misses the point entirely: it was 2,000 years of anti-Semitism. The civilised world has said “Never again”, but that is overoptimistic. Anti-Semitism remains alive and well, not only among the denizens of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran but of course, since 7 October, in countries hitherto thought immune, such as the Western world.

Holocaust education has failed, but it should include the place of Israel in the world and in Jewish life and history. Scholars say that the Holocaust found Jews defenceless. After 7 October, sadly, a Jewish state was able to hit back and may eliminate its enemies, but certainly Israel provides a haven for Jews elsewhere who find themselves threatened by this new anti-Semitism. That fairly obvious statement shows what is so wrong about the theme and location of the memorial planned for VTG. As the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, has said, his intent is that seeing the Palace of Westminster and being reminded of the power of democracy means that there is protection for Jewish people under British values, but that is historically and contemporaneously wrong. Democracy here, now and in the past, has not protected Jewish minorities. We can see that even today there are plenty of people in our democratic Government who wish Israel ill and who have failed to protect the Jewish community from the pressure that it faces right now.

What saves people from genocide? It is having a state of one’s own and the means of self-defence. Take, for example, the Uighurs, Armenians and Tutsis. What they have in common is that they were minorities in a state that had power over them. As the late Lord Sacks of blessed memory pointed out, today’s anti-Semitism is directed at the world’s only Jewish state, which should be a haven for a persecuted minority. He called for Holocaust education to be in context—the context of Jewish history over the millennia, and Jewish culture. In regard to the Holocaust, it is wrong for people to learn only about that and nothing else. The ill-educated person in the street often associates Jews only with the images of concentration camps and knows nothing other than that—nothing about Jewish history and practices.

That is made worse by the films, some of them ghoulish, that deal with that period. This concentration on the Holocaust, taken out of context and history, turns it into just a word for describing something dreadful, which is casually used, as is the word “genocide”. It even results in those accusations being turned against the Jewish people. Holocaust education needs a complete overhaul, rather than being frozen into the same inadequate frame that we will find in the learning centre. That is why there needs to be an endowment fund and a professor, as suggested in Amendment 32, because those awkward topics of anti-Semitism today and Israel need to be faced up to and explained. We want to know why the Government have abandoned the suggested endowment fund.

I turn briefly to alternatives. No effort was made to find a suitable location when Victoria Tower Gardens was announced, but the supporters have clung stubbornly to that site, though they must know in their hearts that it is no good and that the choice has provoked litigation, disharmony, delay, expense and discord in the Jewish community and elsewhere. Indeed, the choice of site has provoked adverse comment around the world. In 2015, the call was only for a central London site of up to 10,000 square metres, with room for conferences, offices and all the appurtenance of a campus, and only near at hand to the memorial given that proponents also recommended that the site incorporate the Imperial War Museum exhibition. So they could not have had in mind an underground construction somewhere else. The choice of VTG was reached without consultation, given that the consultants came up with the London Museum, Millbank Tower and other sites.

I imagine that VTG was chosen because it was free, whereas Imperial War Museum co-operation over the use of its green space was ignored. My own ideal compromise would be a suitable figurative memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens and a suitably sized learning centre somewhere nearby, maybe along Millbank. Buildings on Millbank have been offered. They are available to rent or buy. What about College Green, whose underground is not being used, the education centre in Victoria Tower Gardens or Victoria Tower itself, as the archives have been removed? My favourite is Richmond House, which it seems will not now be used for decant during R&R and which has a forecourt suitable for a memorial and is right by the Cenotaph. No position is more visible and important. Others have suggested the former Museum of London, the Barbican and underneath Carlton House Terrace. There has never been any meeting with the department to consider these suggestions. Michael Gove offered a round table but did not pursue it. The only other meeting with him was a formality, with no intent other than to head off my repeated complaints that there was no discussion. My offers to talk to supporters have been ignored or worse.

We know about the drawbacks of VTG—the cramped nature, the deprivation of local residents, the breach of trust, the environmental damage, the flooding risk, the fire risk, the crowding and the security. The cost is bound to rise. Climate protesters and the public will not be sympathetic to a project that flies in the face of all the government pledges to be green and economical. The Jewish community is sharply divided, with establishment figures and donors on one side and those who study the situation—scholars and most ordinary members, whether of the reform, Orthodox or mainstream persuasion—on the other. Once they know what it looks like and what it will contain, which is carefully hidden from most of us, they are against it.

Advances in technology lessen the case for the exhibition hall. There are already six memorials in this country and 21 learning centres. No one has stopped to think what effect they have or what they achieve. Is anything lacking? Why do we need another one? What is it for? Of course, people outside London will find it hard to get to. I have said before that this is not a memorial, it is not about the Holocaust and it is not a learning centre. The choice of VTG is to make a political point which is naive and misleading: that putting a memorial close to Parliament will make the point that democracy protects Jews and protects against genocide. This is the British values narrative, a project led by the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, and Mr Ed Balls, who also leads the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation. The placement of memorials makes no difference if you look around the world—nor are they a reminder to parliamentarians of the dangers. If parliamentarians have to have a memorial next door, at a cost of £200 million, they must be in even bigger trouble than we thought.

There is no evidence that a visit to this will make any difference. There are 300 memorials around the world, from New Zealand to China, and nobody measures the effect. In fact, anti-Semitism is growing. The memorial will provide a nice political backdrop for politicians who want to pose against it and say, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body”, but it will not help prevent anti-Semitism today. I support the movement to create a wonderful new Jewish museum like the fabulous one in Warsaw, which is placed where the Warsaw ghetto used to be and has made that into a sacred site.

I support all these amendments.