International Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, on obtaining this debate. As a rather humble gentile, and like my noble friend Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, I feel a bit nervous about trying to contribute to this discussion.

My dad fought in the Second World War. As a result, I was brought up on war stories and everything that had happened then. As a student, I was obsessed with the question of how a sophisticated nation such as Germany could end up being run, with a large measure of electoral support, by a bunch of vile criminals. That question still worries me today whenever I see the emergence of what I regard as awful populism in our politics.

There was no Jewish community in Carlisle, where I grew up. My first friend who was a Jew was when I went to work for Bill Rodgers as Minister of Transport in 1976. His wife, Silvia, had come from Berlin, having got out after Kristallnacht with her mother, who was a Communist Party activist and secular Jew. I learned a lot from her. She used to show me pictures of her class and explain that there were only two survivors from it.

The most moving thing was when I paid my first trip to Israel in my 30s and went to Yad Vashem. I will never forget it; to be quite honest, I could barely cope with it. It is one reason why I just cannot come to terms with the anti-Semitism that still exists in our society. Having visited Yad Vashem, I will defend the State of Israel and its right to exist all my life, even though I object to some of the policies of the present Government and some of the people in that Government. Israel has that right to exist. I reject anti-Semitism in my own party; that was one of the things that brought me almost to resignation from the Labour Party, as a result of what was happening prior to 2019. I greatly respect what Keir Starmer has done to root that out.

I will be optimistic for one moment. I remember walking around the reasonably new Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. The fact that Germany has tried to come to terms with its past and repent for its collective sins is a cause for optimism about the future of the world. I end with my hope that, if other genocides are threatened in the world, we will not just stand back and do nothing, as a lot of our politicians did in the 1930s.