Paul Beresford
Main Page: Paul Beresford (Conservative - Mole Valley)(9 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)
I absolutely and totally agree with the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine), and I am a bit shocked by this, because it has come up on me. As a teenager, I lived in a little village in a prosperous agricultural area in the north of the South Island in New Zealand. It was a mecca for European immigrants, who flooded into the area, and the schools were co-educational and multiracial. There were plenty of schoolboy spats, especially on the rugby field, as Members can imagine, but I do not remember any racial aggravation at all.
Most of the men of my parents’ generation were involved in the second world war. Almost all of them served overseas from New Zealand, and when they came back they told stories, including some of the horrific ones we have heard today. Like a typical teenage boy, I got fascinated, and I haunted the village library for appropriate books. Inevitably, in reading them, I read the books on the Nuremberg trials and associated books, and to say I was morbidly horrified would be one of the biggest understatements ever. That was probably capped in 1982 when I saw, at a full-screen cinema, the film “Sophie's Choice”. As a father, that scene of the Gestapo officer walking the wee girl away was the stuff of nightmares, and it would have scarred any parent.
The United Kingdom medical and dental profession is very multiracial. There are a lot of people from the middle east, but also many Jewish people, some of whom I rank not just as colleagues, but as friends. Many are among the best of the profession, with lists of achievements to their name that go across the whole page. Most of them live in north London, and periodically they have made me aware of the progressive rise of what I saw as irrational antisemitic abuse, sometimes associated with violent activity. This activity and violence increased in the run-up to the last election, and then seemed to dull down a bit. To me, however, the Hamas outrage on 7 October—12,000 women, men and children raped, tortured, murdered and beheaded, and some 240 hostages—lit the fire again, as I have seen.
For many of us, this is the stuff of horror, but it has been submerged in the rise of these attacks on Jewish people, including the professional Jewish people in our community. These people have nothing to do with what Israel does to Hamas and no say in that, and what is happening to them is a complete disgrace, with hints of the early days of the Nazis in Germany. The attacks are frightening, and the most vicious, as I had explained to me by a very senior, top-notch dental practitioner, who is an expert on a number of key things and who is treating children—she had tears in her eyes as she was telling me this on Tuesday night—are the attacks on social media. Those attacks are coming on special social media for the profession, so we would assume that every single person writing on it was intelligent and educated, yet the vile abuse on it is ghastly. We are being asked to reflect—and I hope that we do—on whether, as many have said, this could be the thin edge of the wedge. It must not happen again.