Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Katz Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Katz (Lab) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is an honour to speak in the debate, opened by my noble friend Lord Khan, and to hear from so many noble Lords on this subject, not least, in a few minutes’ time, my noble friend Lord Dubs, whose wise words continue to inspire.

I thank noble Lords from across the House for the warm welcome that I have been given in the few days I have been here. I thank the doorkeepers, attendants and all the staff of the House, who have been so supportive and have done their level best—often in vain—to stop me getting lost. I thank my supporters, my noble friends Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Lady Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, and my noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon, for all the support and encouragement that they have given me.

As the memory of the Holocaust, that most singular act of evil, fades into the distance, and the number of survivors who can bear witness to the cruelty of Nazi persecution diminishes, we must redouble our efforts to etch the Shoah, and subsequent genocides, into our collective memory.

I add my voice to those of many other noble Lords today in thanking the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust for all the work that they do to ensure that this happens. However, they face a Sisyphean task. Research from the Claims Conference published last month found that 52% of those surveyed in the UK did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Nearly a third could not name any of the camps or ghettos established in World War II. Those figures underscore the scale of the challenge, in the face of social media misinformation which seeks to downplay, distort and even deny the reality of the Holocaust, one of the most documented events in world history. Our truth is indeed under attack. This is our responsibility too. Debate is coarsened and conspiracies fed when senior politicians compare their opponents with Nazi collaborators or doubt their loyalty to this country.

My family was one of the lucky ones. My dad’s father was the last of my forebears to come to Britain, making the perilous trip from Bialystok—then in Russia, now in Poland—to the East End of London in 1911. Sadly, we know little of what and who he left behind. We cannot be sure, but it seems highly likely that some of my family would have perished in the war, simply for the crime of being born a Jew. My grandfather was a tailor, as was my mum’s father, who insisted that before putting down a deposit on one of the new houses being built in Edgware in the 1930s, the site foreman walked him to the school that was promised to be a few minutes’ away. He knew, as so many immigrant families do, of the power of education to transform your life chances.

The lesson stuck. His daughter, my dear mother Doreen, spent her life teaching and passed the lesson on. As someone who attended a comprehensive that, before me, had never sent a pupil to Oxford, I understand all too well the importance of a decent education in promoting social mobility and providing opportunity, from—perhaps especially from—the earliest years, to university access and vocational education.

This is a vital part of the Government’s economic agenda. We should view human capital as being as important as physical capital when we talk of removing obstacles to growth. I say this as someone who has spent the past two decades working in transport, specifically rail, including for an operator and for the rail union TSSA, where I had the great pleasure and honour of working for Lord Rosser, much missed from this place. So I appreciate the Government’s drive to invest in the infrastructure that our country so dearly needs to thrive. For long a neglected subject, I am pleased to see that this is a real focus for this Government. I am not a died-in-the-wool railwayman. I do not argue rail for rail’s sake but for what it achieves—connecting communities, enabling prosperity and, again, promoting social mobility. We need more rail and more integrated and accessible public transport. I hope to be a strong advocate for it in this place.

More widely, we must build our way out of the economic malaise that we have inherited, using not just infrastructure but housing to address the crisis that young people face—I salute the Government’s ambition on housebuilding and am most definitely a yimby in this regard—nor can we fall into the trap that investment is a zero-sum game geographically. I am a born and bred Londoner but I insist that investing in London will continue to be good for the rest of the country and vice versa. One should not and must not come at the expense of the other.

I pause to reflect that it speaks so highly of both my party and our country that a little over 100 years since Chaim Katz stepped off the boat, fewer than 80 years after Solomon Goldberg left the East End for Edgware and helped found the synagogue there, their grandson is a Peer of the Realm. This is but one thread in the special tapestry woven by immigrants depicting the contribution they have made, and continue to make, in a thousand different ways.

Sadly, the tolerance and generosity of this nation, which helped so many immigrants to settle and thrive, was not to be found for Jewish people in the Labour Party between 2015 and 2019. As chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, a socialist society affiliated to the Labour Party since 1920, I and my colleagues found ourselves defending our members, who faced the vile toxin of left anti-Semitism, which had been allowed to enter, and fester in, the party’s bloodstream. Inaction and passivity from the then party leader sent a clear signal that this discrimination was tolerated. The party that so many of us had joined because it believed in equality and fought discrimination doubled down rather than face the difficult truths. It doubled down out of political convenience.

Too many suffered during those years, but it would be truly remiss of me not to mention my noble friends Lady Hodge of Barking, Lady Anderson, my soon-to-be noble friend Luciana Berger, and Dame Louise Ellman, who were the particular and public targets of much of the hatred. The impact on the wider Jewish community in this country was even greater, considering that at the height of the Labour Party’s membership then, it had a membership of well over 400,000 and there are but 300,000 Jews in this country. I will never forget tear-streaked conversations with people in Hendon and Mill Hill—lifelong Jewish Labour voters telling me they simply could not trust the party, our party, any more. How could we have let them down so badly?

It is for ever to his credit that the first thing Keir Starmer did when he won his leadership election was apologise for and vow to root out anti-Semitism from our party. He understood the moral and political necessity of this mission, and he succeeded. Working with my noble friends Lord Evans of Sealand and Lady Ramsey of Wall Heath, who I look forward to hearing from later, we in the JLM challenged, cajoled and drove Labour to meet the challenges set down by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, following that body’s landmark ruling that the party had broken equalities law. Process and rule change were part of that story, but education and leadership, as ever, much more so. I will for ever be proud of the role we in the Jewish Labour Movement played in helping to save the Labour Party.

My party is still in the foothills of rebuilding trust with the Jewish community, but I think we have returned to a place where Jews voting in the general election last year made their choice on policy platforms, not out of fear, as they did in 2019. We must never—never—allow that situation to arise again. Indeed, if the 2019 election was in part about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, in turn the 2024 election was, in a smaller part, about anti-Semitism in the whole country. As we have already heard from my noble friend the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, following 7 October, which saw the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism has risen to unprecedented levels, not merely as a reaction to the ground war that started some time after that date, but from the day itself.

Anti-Semitism, to paraphrase Conor Cruise O’Brien, is the lightest of sleepers. Any excuse will stir it to life. On our campuses, on our streets, around our homes, our synagogues and our schools, the levels of anxiety and fear that British Jews feel is palpable—the worst I have seen in my lifetime. The Prime Minister has been clear that this spike in anti-Jewish hate is intolerable, just as he has been clear that the remaining hostages taken by Hamas on that fateful day and being held in Gaza still must all be brought home now.

It surely cannot be difficult for us all to grasp that we must not blame British Jews for the actions of the Israeli Government, just as we do not blame British Muslims for the actions of Hamas. From this basic proposition, surely all else must follow. As ever, it is through education that we must tackle hate on all sides. Integral to this is ensuring that Holocaust education is, in the words of our Prime Minister, “a truly national endeavour”.