Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, my views are very much in line with those of the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft. My father was an Army doctor who was at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, when 13,000 unburied bodies were found, alongside 60,000 surviving skeletons, 14,000 of whom died in the first three months after liberation. My father would certainly have demanded an appropriate Holocaust memorial in central London, as do I.

The case is overwhelming, lest we forget—but why Victoria Tower Gardens? I listened very carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, but I did not hear an explanation as to why he overruled his commission, which looked at 29 sites and recommended three, by choosing one that was in neither the 29 nor the three. I do not understand why there has to be such a downside to establishing the memorial centre that we undoubtedly need.

I can see that Victoria Tower Gardens would be quite a good place to have another statue, ideally of the same quality as the Burghers of Calais, and I think I understand the concept of the design, with its—no doubt deliberately—ugly spines and its ramp, underground bunker and gates of Hades. But where I part company completely with the plan is that there is absolutely no way you can site there an education centre of the kind that we need, as the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, said. For me, it is the education centre that really matters. The place is too small for an appropriate centre and yet far too big for the site. Surely the right place for auditoria, lecture theatres, cinemas and so on, where successive generations can learn, is where people now go to learn.

In Washington, the admirable Holocaust museum is alongside the Smithsonian. Our young people go to our museums quarter in Kensington, to the British Library or to the museum in Southwark. I do not see why we have to do co-location and, if we have to do co-location, I do not see how we can do it in Victoria Tower Gardens, because there is no room for the sort of education centre that we need.

Why do we need it? We need it because it was a horrific event and one in which we were involved. On the wrong side, the Germans rightly commemorate the horror of what they did and teach it in schools; we need to teach the horror of what we failed to do. I salute the grandfather of the noble Lord, Lord Russell, but his was very much a minority position.

Our Government’s response to the Nuremberg laws and to Kristallnacht was not to protest, offer sanctuary and amend the Aliens Act. On the contrary, our Government hung back, and went on hanging back, which is one of the reasons why the Évian conference and the Bermuda conference failed. Nobody stepped in. We did not attempt to encourage others to step in or step in ourselves.

Kindertransport was an admirable initiative, but not one backed by government, who insisted that hosts had to guarantee full financial sponsorship. Only in 1946, with the war over, was UK citizenship on offer to the tragic orphans of Kindertransport. In 1938, the Daily Mail shouted:

“The way stateless Jews and Germans are pouring in through every port in this country is becoming an outrage”.


We need to learn about that, and we need to learn from that. Today, the Daily Mail still sings a similar song, but now it is about asylum seekers. The Sun talks about “migrants storming Kent’s beaches”. A recent Home Secretary talked about “invasions” and the last Prime Minister saw the Rwanda scheme as a potential vote winner. Manston, although bad, is no Bergen-Belsen, but we still need to be regularly reminded of where monstering minorities can lead.

So, I strongly back an education centre. If we fail to learn from history, we risk repeating it. However, we need a proper education centre, which means we need a proper plan. We need to go back to what the commission set up by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, originally recommended when it comes to the question of sites.

Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 11th June 2025 Lords Chamber

My third question to the Minister is a very simple and practical one. Where is the model that was here in the Royal Gallery last week? Again, many noble Lords will not have seen it, and many noble Lords will not have read the full report, which describes exactly what this memorial is like. If the Minister, his colleagues and the promoters of this project are proud of the project, why is the model not there right now for us all to go out and look at, to be sure whether we consider it to be the right kind in the right place or not? It must have cost a lot of money to make that model, and it is not here today. I think that says something about the confidence that the Minister and promoters have in the project they are asking us to support.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

The core of the problem is that the learning centre is too cramped, small and poky. I do not think it should be underground, but the real problem is that it is too small to tell such a huge story. What we have is a site that is too small for the Shoah but a project that is too big for the site. The learning centre is what really matters.

My credentials to speak are not nearly as good as others. My father was an Army doctor at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, but he never told us anything about it, so shocked was he by what he saw. I learned about his role there—I think he was the first Army doctor in—only after he was dead. I think that he would have said that what matters most of all is the education, and for that you really do need a lecture theatre and libraries as well as electronics and computer desks. A tourist exhibit down a hole in the gardens does not match up to what one is looking for from an education centre.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I will address directly the question that my noble friend posed on why collocation is important and why this is the right location. I would just like to dispel a couple of myths in this debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Russell, for bringing it, and I think it is a very important and measured debate that we are having. It is an honour to contribute to it at all.

As I said, I have been on the Holocaust Memorial Foundation for a decade. That is my only lived experience of this. But what I have learned in that decade from sitting alongside real experts in Holocaust education is that it is so important that we feel this, as well as learning facts. I remind noble Lords that the leaders of all Holocaust education organisations in this country believe that this is the right place, the right size and the right way to do this as a national memorial. They know a thousandfold or a millionfold more than I do. I have watched them at work over the course of the last decade and I think that we should respect them, as my noble friend Lord Howard said earlier.

It will not be a tribute to British greatness—quite the opposite. It will ask us to think very deeply about Britain’s role in the Holocaust. There are some things that we can proud of but lots that we cannot. I would argue that, tempting though it is to believe that this is like the Cenotaph and that we would walk past and feel the pain of the victims and their families, actually the most difficult part of Holocaust education is not to think, “Oh my God, it could be my family who were victims”. The most difficult part of Holocaust education is to ask yourself “Could you have been a perpetrator?” That is the lesson that could not be more important today.

The sad thing is that, with every week that I have been on the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, it has felt more important that, as a country, we ask people to think about that. Collocating the memorial and the learning centre in the shadow of the Mother of Parliaments, where so many people have fought for liberty and freedom, is why it is the right place at the right time.