Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I will respond briefly to what has been said on this group of amendments. The Minister will perhaps be grateful to me if I do not repeat all the arguments made in the eloquent speeches we have heard this afternoon. In turn, I will be very grateful to him if he gives a full reply to all the points raised and the questions asked. I particularly want to hear from him what the Government intend to do if the planning application, as I believe the Government intend, leads to a decision to turn down this proposal. I want to know from him whether the Government’s current position—they must have some position on this—is to call it in or to accept what the experts and the politicians on Westminster City Council believe is the right decision. I give my noble friend a little warning that I will get up and ask again if he does not produce an answer to that.

My main reason for speaking is that, like the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, I was at one time the Minister in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport responsible not just for the arts but for heritage. One of the most shocking things about this project relates to the 1900 Act, which was set up in good faith in perpetuity to protect these gardens for the use of residents and other users. We are seeing a blatant disregard for what legislators decided. Admittedly that was a long time ago, but for many years no Governments have decided to disapply the Act to this important garden. The Minister has to say why he thinks this disapplication is acceptable. It is profoundly wrong on social, environmental and political grounds, and in terms of thinking about the future of this particular part of London.

I want to pick up on what the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said about the heritage issues. It is shocking that UNESCO—an extremely important part of the United Nations’ activities, protecting our culture and our heritage around the world—should be ignored. I just do not think a British Government should do that. We are committed members of the United Nations, and we have been committed to UNESCO. On a number of occasions I, as a Minister, sat with my officials discussing how we would ensure that all the British world heritage sites were properly maintained, sustained and cared for, and how we should carefully select new ones when we had an opportunity to do so. As it happened, when I was the Minister responsible, I selected Kew Gardens, which was not a world heritage site but absolutely deserved to be. We gave it some funding to make sure that it could prepare an application for it.

I really urge the Minister to discuss this further, not only in his own department but in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which has some responsibility for heritage issues and for what UNESCO decides to do. Perhaps he could let the Committee know whether any discussions have taken place with his colleagues in that department, and whether there has been any direct contact with UNESCO about the decision to ignore what UNESCO has been saying for the last five years. It is also important that Historic England, an agency funded by the Government, has also come out totally against using the site for this project.

I rest my case. I will not say any more, but I support what has already been said, not just on this matter but by the other contributors to this debate on the whole area of planning.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, it is a particular pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, who noble Lords will recall suggested at a previous session that I said that people who were against this were antisemitic, which was clearly wrong. Most people would have sought all kinds of ways to find their way around those words, but I am delighted to say that the noble Baroness most graciously apologised to me. I accept that apology and I accept that it was made in good faith, and I have to say that I think it takes a great person to admit when they have made a mistake.

I place on record my gratitude to the Government for the announcement made last night at the Community Security Trust dinner by the Home Secretary that the new memorial will receive the protection of the new offence of damage to a public memorial. That is an important announcement, and we are grateful for it.

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[Lord Robathan (Con)]

We are talking about the planning process now. Some of us do not quite understand why the decision of Westminster City Council was overturned by the Government in 2019.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

That was a perfectly proper and normal process, as established in the planning rules. Of course the Government can do that, through the proper process, and have a public inquiry; that is a normal thing. What the council cannot do is meet as a group to decide on planning permissions. The reason why the law was changed was because of a number of dodgy decisions taken in the 1960s for political and personal financial reasons. That is why it is not possible to discuss planning applications.

These things are taken completely independently. There have been some ingenious arguments put forward, which I have enjoyed, but, essentially, it is the same thing: “We want a different planning system. We don’t want one that applies to the rest of the country. We want a planning application that applies to where we live, and we want to decide it because we’re in the House of Lords”. That is an untenable position and one that is difficult to justify outside. This Bill does not seek to grant planning permission; it does not take it into the planning permission. Nothing in this process relates to town and country planning. It just opens the possibility for town and country planning to be applied to this process.

The Imperial War Museum is a key partner in this. It supports the memorial in the Victoria Tower Gardens. Regarding UNESCO, we should remember that this is not in its area; it is outside it. We are perhaps entitled to get the opinion of Historic England. I am sure that it was just because of a question of time—she was coming to the end of her time—that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, did not give Historic England’s view; of course, it looked at this matter specifically. It said that

“the proposals would not significantly harm the Outstanding Universal Value of the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey including Saint Margaret’s Church World Heritage Site”.

We are grateful for that but, ultimately, something such as this has to be determined by the Minister. The Government, who are responsible for our security, have to make that decision in conjunction with the security forces.

I am going to sit down now, but I do hope that we can conduct this in a slightly more comradely fashion. In 1992, during my first appearance on a committee, I accused George Mudie, who was then a Member of Parliament—and quite a good friend of mine, actually—of issuing weasel words. I was hauled over the coals for that, and I had to make a full and frank apology. But, apparently, your Lordships’ House, which is supposed to be the dignified end of the constitution, can serve words such as these without it even raising an eyebrow.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 21. I have a few straightforward questions for the Minister on the so-called planning process. First, I say to my noble friend Lord Pickles, in the most comradely and indeed cuddly way, that I think he misunderstood what my noble friend Lord Robathan was saying. I do not take my noble friend Lord Robathan’s comments to mean that the Labour and Tory groups met in some secret cabal or caucus to sabotage the planning application. I took them to mean that, when they met in the council properly to determine it, all the Tories and Labour people voted against it, perfectly legitimately—not in some secret caucus.

The questions I have for the Minister are straightforward. First, will he confirm that the designated Minister to decide on the three options that he mentioned last week will be from his own department? Will it be Matthew Pennycook MP, Jim McMahon OBE MP, Rushanara Ali MP, Alex Norris MP or the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage? Secondly, will he state how their independence will be judged?

I must tell the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, that in my opinion there is not the slightest snowflake’s chance in Hades that the Government will again send this to Westminster City Council for a planning application. They will go for the other two internal options. In that regard, will the Minister set out exactly how the round-table proposal will work? Who will be invited, how many round tables will there be and what written evidence will they accept?

Finally, there is a suggestion for written representations as another option. Will he or the designated Minister accept and give full consideration to all written representations received, just like the planning application to Westminster City Council? If the designated Minister rejects them, will his or her justification be set out in full?

For the benefit of any present who may wish to give the Minister any advisory notes from the Box, I repeat: who will be the designated Minister? How will the department determine his or her independence? How will the round tables work? Will written representations permit all the representations that Westminster City Council receives? How will they be assessed? Will the designated Minister set out in full the reasons for rejecting written arguments, if the decision to go ahead is taken?

There you go, my Lords: two and a half minutes, which is a record for me in this Committee.

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In conclusion, there is no justification for adding other genocides and breaking the solemn declaration that we signed in Stockholm in 2000 and again in 2020. If we are to add others, the choice should be a lot better than those weirdly selected ones of Darfur, Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. None of the past countries that have suffered genocide—except perhaps for Burma and China and what Putin is doing in Ukraine—have continuing calls for a new genocide. No one is denying their genocides like we have with Holocaust denial, which is why it is essential that this learning centre concentrates on the Holocaust and the rising tide of antisemitism only—nothing else. I beg to move.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, this gives me an opportunity to remind the Committee of my declaration of interest. I am pleased that my noble friend referred to the Stockholm declaration; I am sure he is delighted that it created the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, of which I am a former chairman. He will also be delighted that we met in February this year, in London, not only to celebrate the last 25 years but to plan the next 25 years. I am pleased that the United Kingdom has played such an important part in ensuring that the Shoah goes on to be remembered. I am not one who thinks there are any lessons from the Holocaust, but there are lots of warnings and it is important that we bear them in mind.

It is important not to conflate the memorial with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. As my noble friend said, I am vice-president of that. I do not occupy an executive role. I took on the role to try to help out when the late Sir Ben Helfgott of blessed memory was perhaps not as ambulant as he had been. I agreed to stay on an extra year and will be standing down in July this year. I am delighted that Sir Sajid Javid is taking over as chair.

My noble friend talked about the importance of the Shoah, but I have to tell him with some reluctance that that is not what this amendment says. This is a very dangerous amendment. It will bring comfort to those who wish to rinse their history and to say, “No, it wasn’t us. It was just them Nazis who caused the genocide”. That is certainly not the case.

There are two great certainties about the Holocaust. The first is that, whether you lived in a village nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees or deep in the forests of Belarus, the Nazis and their machine did not need to tell you about antisemitism; you knew all about it. They might have given messages that reinforced this prejudice, but antisemitism was there.

The second truth is that there were not enough Nazis to produce the Holocaust. The Nazis could not have done it by themselves; they required collaboration. For example, they needed the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia, the Iron Guard in Romania, the Ustaše in Croatia—which went a stage further and actually had its own concentration camp—and the Arrow Cross in Hungary. The Arrow Cross committed atrocities and sadism that in many cases were worse than the Nazis. None of these organisations were Nazis.

Those areas that were occupied—eventually Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia were occupied, along with former allies Bulgaria, France and the Netherlands—used the police and gendarmerie to round up and take their Jewish populations to be murdered, either in ditches or in the gas chambers. I recently visited a number of the Baltic nations—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland—and in all these countries people were brought to their death by local gendarmes. Just a few Fridays ago, I stood in a forest in the snow looking at the heaps of bodies that had been eventually cremated. They were all taken there by local gendarmes—people who were not Nazis.

Places like Jasenovac did not have gas chambers. Their favourite method of killing children was to bash them on the back of the head with a hammer, up close and very personal. “Do you want to meet your mummy?” was the question they would ask prior to slamming the hammer into their head. None of those people were Nazis.

There is a serious attempt to use the Holocaust as a way of rinsing history. The house of faiths in Hungary attempted to show Hungary being a victim of the Nazis, when in fact it was fully co-operative and collaborate. Look at the defamation laws in Poland, where it is a criminal offence to suggest that Poles were involved in the persecution of Jews. All these countries are really in favour of celebrating the blessed among the nations; they will talk for ever about the people who saved Jews, and we should remember them and regard them with honour. But we should understand that those people were great exceptions to the rule. The majority of the population did nothing—they either collaborated or just looked the other way. Austria can no longer call itself the first victim of the Nazis. France has now admitted its culpability. Italy has admitted its culpability in the Holocaust.

I have to say to my noble friend that his amendment as written would give those bodies an enormous fillip. He said, “Well, it’s a long way away and hasn’t affected us”. I ask Members to remind themselves: about two years ago, a very glossy book was sent to every Member of this House from the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, which showed Poland’s involvement in the Second World War. It looked nice, with lots of diagrams and photographs. There were no lies in it but there were an awful lot of omissions. No one talked about the pogroms that happened after the Second World War, when returning Jews were murdered by Polish citizens. There are deliberate attempts to twist the Holocaust.

This question is a serious matter. I take exception to the idea that somehow the memorial is going to deal with anything other than the Shoah. That is quite wrong. There is not going to be a room on Rwanda or anything else. Do not conflate things with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. But what will it deal with? How does it need to look beyond the Shoah? There are two specific reasons. You cannot honour the dead. You cannot understand what happened in the Shoah without understanding those two great legal changes: crimes against humanity and genocide as a crime.

We need to be able to reference them, because we are very happy to bow our heads on 27 January and repeat the great lie “never again”. Of course, I do not believe for one moment that we will ever see a nation that together will decide to murder its population using mechanical means. That is not going to happen, but people dying by being shot and dumped in a ditch almost certainly does and will happen. More people died in a ditch than were gassed in the death factories; we need to understand that.

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[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I added my name in support of Amendment 32 because it responds to a concern that I raised at Second Reading. I am sorry that I could not have been here for previous days in Committee when the scope of the learning centre was discussed, and in particular on day 2, when Amendment 2 was debated, and on day 3, when there was a very animated debate around the learning centre.

I was reassured by what the noble Lord, Lord Austin, said about the focus that historians have decided to put on the centre. None the less, I remain a bit unnerved by the language in the Explanatory Notes to which Lord Blencathra has referred, and by the answer that the Minister gave at Second Reading in response to the concern that I and others such as the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, raised. He said:

“The learning centre will also address subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur”.—[Official Report, 4/9/24; col. 1224.]


It seems to me that a learning centre needs focus. It cannot cover all atrocities, whether genocidal or not. All those situations obviously involved very serious crimes against humanity, war crimes at a minimum, and probably genocide—certainly genocide in the case of Rwanda and Srebrenica. I do not claim to have any particular expertise on any of those situations, but I have some knowledge of the Rwandan genocide because I started my academic career interviewing victims of that genocide. Months into my fieldwork, I had only just begun to understand the complexity of Rwandan society, Rwandan history and identities in Rwanda, which are far more complex than people understand. So I just do not see how something as tragic and as complex as the Rwandan genocide could be meaningfully addressed in a learning centre that is already devoted principally to the Holocaust.

Obviously, I would not have any objection to a board at the end referring to other atrocities that may be similar in nature, which I believe the noble Lord, Lord Austin, mentioned. But there is a difference between that message, which can be conveyed at the end, and the intent to address these other genocides as learning experiences as part of the learning centre.

We also need to realise that, unfortunately, the concept of genocide is going through a process of rather intense instrumentalisation at the international level. At the moment, we have at least four disputes involving the genocide convention before the International Court of Justice. We have disputes between Russia and Ukraine, Gambia and Myanmar, South Africa and Israel, and, as of last week, a case brought by Sudan against the United Arab Emirates. The reason for this proliferation of genocide litigation is that the genocide convention is quite often the only treaty that is available against that state for submitting a dispute to the International Court of Justice.

Be that as it may, in each of these cases there will be groups and campaigns which argue that that particular situation is genocidal in nature and comparable to the Holocaust. Those campaigns and groups would contend that those situations would have to be addressed in a learning centre if that centre has pledged, as it seems that this one has done, to address subsequent genocide. I fear that we can expect a great deal of controversy about what counts as a subsequent genocide that needs to be included in this learning centre. We would be much better off avoiding that controversy by defining the scope of the centre at the outset much more clearly. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, has given us a sense of the kind of arguments that we could get into about all the other situations that have been claimed to be genocidal in nature.

I understand the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, but I do not think the issue is whether the learning centre should address what happened during the Shoah that involved non-Nazis or Nazi sympathisers elsewhere in Europe. That is very much part of the history of the Shoah, and therefore the Ustaše, the Hungarian collaborators and the fascists in Italy would all have to be part of that history. Maybe the language can be clarified to make that absolutely clear, but I understand the amendment to say that the focus of the learning centre must be the Holocaust in its entirety.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

It does not say that.

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

The language could be changed to clarify that; the Nazi genocide of the Jews is how I read it. However, what concerns me and the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, is the subsequent genocide and not including the entirety of the Shoah.

I do not see this amendment as disruptive of the Bill, the memorial or the learning centre. Its purpose is to clarify what the centre is about and, as I see it, to ensure that the focus of the learning centre should remain the Holocaust. I would have thought that, understood in those terms, this amendment could attract support from those enthusiastic about the project, those who are less enthusiastic and the sceptics. However, I understand that that may not be the case.

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[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

I just say to noble Lords that we do not want to be reliving the whole debate, as passionate as it is. We should be winding up now, as the Minister has sat down.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

I can do this in 20 seconds. All I am saying is that the Arrow Cross was murdering Jews in Hungary while Hitler was attempting the Munich putsch. The antisemitic laws were first introduced not at Nuremberg but in Hungary.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I will happily take that guidance from my noble friend; he may be absolutely right. I say to the Government Whip that we are not reliving the debate; I am trying to wind up the most important debate we have had in this Session over the last few days, and it is important to deal with the very important points raised by my noble friend Lord Pickles.

Okay, I am quite happy to remove the word “Nazi” and to say “Nazi-inspired”. We all agree that if we did not say “Nazi”, the amendment would be perfectly in order, because no one in this Room who supports the amendment is suggesting that we included the word “Nazi” to somehow exonerate Poland or the other countries that did it and are trying to concentrate just on a few hundred misguided people who wore the SS uniform. Of course that is not the case. We want this memorial and learning centre to be about everyone who exterminated Jews, whichever country they were in and whatever nationality they were.

That is the point made, in conclusion, by my noble friend Lord Robathan. He said that the whole point of the memorial is the genocide of the Jews by whoever did it. It has to be the Holocaust only, and none of the other four genocides suggested here has any relevance to the Holocaust. They should be ignored: the Holocaust and antisemitism only. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.