Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Verdirame Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I would like to say a few words about the learning centre. Like other noble Lords who have spoken before, such as the noble Lords, Lord Goodman and Lord Mann, my main concern is about the content. Holocaust education in this era faces two key challenges. The first, as others have remarked, is that we are going through a period of rising anti-Semitism. This is a fact that should give us all pause to reflect on how effective our education about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism has been. How can anti-Semitism still be on the rise, and how do we explain the fact that it is rising among people who consider themselves progressive, and who may often be genuinely progressive in a lot of ways? If we do not use this occasion to ask ourselves these difficult and uncomfortable questions, we risk building a monument to our failure.

While Cynics may have been wrong to think that virtue cannot be taught, it is true that some virtues are more difficult to teach than others, and freedom from anti-Semitism is one of them. As the Oxford physicist David Deutsch suggested, the reason may be that we too often tend to think of anti-Semitism as another type of racist hatred or xenophobia. Anti-Semitism may cause both those things, but it is fundamentally different. Professor Deutsch argues:

“It is a more dangerous moral pathology, centred on the need to preserve the legitimacy of hurting Jews for being Jews”.


This moral pathology has emerged over centuries and not just in the Christian West, by the way. The reason why so many of our Jewish friends and colleagues consider certain criticisms of Israel as anti-Semitic is not because they think that it is anti-Semitic to criticise Israeli policies, but because some of those criticisms are so disproportionate, absurd and obsessive that what drives them is precisely the irrational impulse to want to find some justification for violence against Jews. Unless people are made aware of this distinctive and uniquely irrational mode of thinking and acting that is the essence of anti-Semitism, many people, including some of the highly educated, will continue to fall victim to it.

The second challenge for the learning centre is another contemporary malaise: conceptual overreach. Another Oxford professor, John Tasioulas, has argued that this is a particular form of degradation of the public sphere, whereby core ideas—such as human rights, the rule of law and now genocide—are put through

“a process of expansion or inflation”

in the mistaken belief that expanding their meaning and overusing them is a form of progressive politics. It is not; it is the opposite. It blurs important moral distinctions, discredits ideas and corrupts public argument. How will the learning centre teach a new generation about the genocide of European Jewry at a time when the word “genocide” is losing its meaning and being instrumentalised even in the most august international fora? In fact, it is perversely and cruelly being used to find excuses for—guess what?—violence against Jews.

Last April I was privileged to be invited by the Rwandan Government to attend, in Kigali, the 30th commemoration of the genocide of the Tutsis. I began my career in the late 1990s interviewing Rwandan exiles in Nairobi, where the community included survivors of the genocide but also some perpetrators. The latter, thankfully, were dispatched to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda shortly thereafter and convicted. I was impressed by the way Rwanda commemorates the genocide and educates about it. No one made grotesque comparisons with other situations. There was no mission creep, and no attempt to use that occasion as an opportunity to raise other causes, however worthy. They were focused on the commemoration of that tragic event, and theirs was a genuine and sombre attempt to understand how it could happen.

Looking at the objectives of the Holocaust Memorial Charitable Trust did not allay my concerns about conceptual overreach. The objectives include goals such as promoting human rights throughout the world, promoting equality and diversity, and furthering charitable purposes relating to persecution more generally. All are wonderful goals, but a learning centre that seeks to teach everything will teach nothing. I echo the questions from the noble Lord, Lord Austin, to the Minister, who I hope can reassure us that there will be no such mission creep, that the learning centre will maintain focus and that it will have the moral courage to reach out to those communities in our society where we know that anti-Semitism is prevalent and where the need for Holocaust education is the greatest.

Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Verdirame Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, I also signed this amendment. I was interested in what my noble friends said, in particular my noble friends Lord Pickles and Lord Tugendhat. The point is that this will be a relatively small area. The appalling and destructive nature of the Nazi regime and its allies, wherever they were found, is well known, but we need to reinforce it. I thought that was the purpose of this: it will be called the Holocaust memorial. Perhaps I have this wrong, but I saw statements that other genocides will be commemorated. It will be too small to commemorate other genocides.

My noble friend Lord Pickles talked about Poles. I remember going to Auschwitz with the excellent Karen Pollock and the Holocaust memorial group. It was the most amazing visit, in 24 hours, and should be repeated: if people have not been to Auschwitz, they should go, and it is particularly well done by Karen Pollock. We all knew it at the time, but guess what? Not all the guards were dyed in the wool Germans —a lot of them were Poles, whatever the Polish Government have said. Sadly, in current times, I am told that a very prominent group in many of the concentration camps, including Belsen, were Ukrainians. I do not know, but I am told that that is true. This should be made plain, but either this is a Holocaust memorial or a memorial to all discrimination anywhere. That is my point. Let us have a Holocaust memorial, not a memorial to discrimination against anybody, anywhere, because otherwise the whole thing will be diluted.

My noble friend has talked about the anti-Israeli behaviour on the streets—let us be quite clear that it is anti-Jewish behaviour on the streets, not just anti-Israel. We need to get that absolutely plain. That is why, wherever we put it, this memorial should be a Holocaust memorial. By all means have charts saying, “And by the way, we are appalled by continuing discrimination wherever it may be”, but let us stick to the Holocaust alone.

[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.

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I have an amendment in this group which, I regret to say, I should probably have asked to be degrouped because I do not intend to follow the debate so far, except to say that it highlights the tremendous importance of what is set up as the learning centre part of the memorial and learning centre. It reinforces my view that what is on the table at the moment simply goes no way to meeting the kind of description that my noble friend Lord Pickles and others have spoken about.

Before coming to my amendment, I quote the last sentence of Britain’s Promise to Remember in recommendation 1:

“But it is also clear that a memorial on its own is not enough and that there must be somewhere close at hand where people can go to learn more”.


That vividly shows the commission’s view. It did not in any way want to see what it saw as a very long development in recommendation 2 that needed to be thought about. Would there be enough money to do the things it wanted to do? All sorts of things had to be developed in a flexible way.

The purpose of my amendment is to try to end—or come close to ending—this Committee’s deliberations on a positive note rather than a negative one. As the Committee will know, I have proposed two amendments before, and I raised a lot of questions in them and made a lot of points. The first one particularly emphasised the differences between what was in the commission’s report and was accepted and what is on the table today, and the second one questioned the reasons why the commission’s recommendation immediately to form a management body has been rejected and is still under consideration. It seems to me that such a body could have done a deal of good work over the last few years.