Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I have three reasons for speaking at Second Reading today. The first is that one of my great grandfathers, in December 1938, after Kristallnacht, put his name to something called the “Lord Baldwin Fund for Refugees”. In the next eight months it managed to raise the modern-day equivalent of nearly £43 million, which was used directly to bring Kindertransport children to this country.

Secondly, the previous holder of the rather long name that I bear, my grandfather, was the Deputy Judge Advocate-General and responsible for the management of all war crimes trials in British-occupied Germany between 1946 and 1951. He and his team had to gather the evidence of the horrors which the Holocaust memorial and any educational centre will try to tell the world about. In 1954, only eight years after the end of the war, horrified by growing evidence of Holocaust denial, including in Germany, he published a book, The Scourge of the Swastika, which I am ashamed to say is still in print. Over the years, many of your Lordships have told me that they read it at a relatively young age and have never forgotten it.

Thirdly, I am a petitioner, among others, on this Bill. In principle, how can one be against the idea of a national Holocaust memorial? But what a muddle we have got ourselves into in a wonderfully and typically British way. The report of the Holocaust Memorial Bill Select Committee in another place from 17 April of this year makes uncomfortable reading. I suggest that all noble Lords, whatever their views, would benefit from reading what it says. In some ways the most important thing is what it does not say, because there is clearly a high degree of scepticism, a feeling that the committee has not been told as much as it would wish to know and that it has been quite constrained during its deliberations to actually get to the heart of the matter—an echo, I am afraid, of other instances where decisions to go forward with a project are often taken in the political rush of the moment without necessarily having thought through in detail what needs to be done to do it effectively.

There is clearly quite a high level of discomfort about this Bill. On the basis of past experience, things are likely to get worse before they get better. At the moment, with the rise in anti-Semitism, the last thing that we should inadvertently do is agree to an already flawed process which runs the risk of continuing as it has done to date.

There is a saying which is suitable since the construction would involve a degree of excavation. It is that if you are in a hole, it is usually quite good advice to stop digging. I speak as someone who, in his late teens, used to help our gardener, who was the local gravedigger, so I know exactly what is involved. On the assumption that this Bill proceeds—and I am sure it will—I would hope that lessons have been learned from the fact that we are where we are today and from the degree of dissent and concern around the Chamber that there clearly is.

A combination of the noble Lords, Lord Mann and Lord Carlile, really put their finger on the essence of this. This is not just a sculpture, a symbol; it is above all a tool and a way of trying to educate all of us, but particularly the generations after us, to try to inoculate us against the toxicity of anti-Semitism, which is all around us. We cannot be inoculated unless we really understand what that disease is. Once we understand it, we have a chance of being inoculated successfully. I am sure this will proceed, but for goodness’ sake, let us learn the lessons to date and do it better than we have heretofore.