Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. I congratulate and thank the new Members of your Lordships’ House on their maiden speeches, all of which were deeply moving.

It somehow seems fitting that I should make my first speech since recent surgery to repair an undiagnosed femur fracture—on which I have been unwittingly, if somewhat painfully, hobbling for months—by speaking in this debate. It was, after all, my childhood Jewish refugee surgeon, Hanuš Weisl, who put me back together again more times than I care to remember. He lost almost all his family in the Holocaust. I think of him today and his family members, whom the wonderful Wiener Holocaust Library has established were murdered in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. May they rest in peace and may their memory be a blessing.

Inevitably, all of us, as we have heard in this debate, turn our thoughts to our precious Holocaust survivors and to the world’s promise to them immediately after the war: “Never again”. How do we best honour them, our Holocaust survivors? I ask myself what “Never again” means. Does it, for example, simply mean no more concentration camps, crematoria or gas chambers—the physical structures which the Soviet troops stumbled upon in disbelief 80 years ago? Does it mean no more Nuremberg laws, to which Matthew Pennycook, in his powerful Statement of 23 January in the other place, implicitly referred in terms of the Nazi legislation discriminating against Jews and depriving them of rights and property? Mercifully, both are very unlikely in today’s world.

So I ask myself another question: how do we counter the challenge that remains? How do we perform the task of eradicating what the Minister described in his poignant opening remarks as man’s darkest impulses? Does that insidious and poisonous prejudice—which informed, by osmosis and within a remarkably short period of time, the culture underpinning the abomination that was the Holocaust—still exist?

We have already heard about the IHRA’s current theme, “In Plain Sight”. That phrase reminded me of something that the remarkable Holocaust survivor, Manfred Goldberg, whom the Minister mentioned, said to me about the promise “Never again”. Manfred told me that he had genuinely taken it for granted that the promise would be kept; he took it at face value at the time and for all time. I know that he is horrified that the hatred is back and in plain sight.

That brought home to me that it is not enough for me to say, “We will always remember you and the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust”. In an age of pernicious poison spread via social media, we need to acknowledge the racism still in plain sight on the streets of our capital most weekends. I refer of course to the demonstrations in central London, the first of which—the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign—unbelievably started organising while the 7 October pogrom was under way.

As well as being the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, 2025 is the 60th anniversary of Labour’s Race Relations Act receiving Royal Assent. As noble Lords will know, the Act made the promotion of hatred on the grounds of race, colour and ethnic or national origins an offence. The vile vitriol being visited on our Jewish communities clearly runs counter to the Act. This is racism, pure and simple, and it is happening in plain sight. I ask the Minister to say in her closing remarks whether she agrees that a fitting way both to mark the Act’s anniversary and to assure the survivors that “Never again” means exactly that would be for His Majesty’s Government to be even more clear that what is happening on our streets is racism and it will not be tolerated.

I take one common, supposedly innocent chant as an example. Now, I know what is meant by “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—survivors certainly do. It means the destruction of Israel. It means the mass murder of Jews for being Jews, as we saw Hamas perpetrate on 7 October. It means a one-state, not a two-state, solution.

It is understandable that, in our desire to see peace in the Middle East, some want to believe that we are dealing with a peace-loving entity in Hamas. Yet if there is one organisation that has shown time and again that it is absolutely against peace and that it does not want a two-state solution, it is Hamas; rather, it wants to kill Jews and destroy the State of Israel. I refer noble Lords to Hamas’s statements of 24 October 2023, 30 January, 14 June and 24 October 2024. Its racist, genocidal hatred on grounds of race is in plain sight.

In conclusion, I want to take up the challenge set by my noble friend Lady Eaton in her excellent speech. I welcome the assurance given by the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, on Monday that Hamas can play no part in the future of Gaza’s governance. But can the Minister assure the House that its supporters here in the UK will not be allowed to reduce her and our sincere, renewed pledge of “Never again” to a meaningless mantra recited to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day? Surely we can all agree that that is the least our survivors and the millions of victims of the Holocaust deserve.