Holocaust Memorial Day

Debate between Robert Jenrick and Shailesh Vara

Thursday 27th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

Absolutely. My right hon. Friend has a long record, of which he should be proud, of drawing the attention of the House to exactly those issues. That is exactly the point I was turning to.

Since the holocaust, human civilisation has advanced by virtually every metric. We live today in the most advanced human civilisation in history, yet we are still capable of such evil. To acknowledge that fallibility and where it can lead is the best corrective to these indescribable tragedies. The genocide committed on the Jews, the Roma, the Gypsies and the disabled in Europe in the 1940s was, as my right hon. Friend says, not an aberration in history. There have been subsequent genocides in our living memory: the millions of victims of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; the million-plus victims of the Rwandan genocide; and the 8,000 Muslim men and boys who were murdered in Srebrenica.

Today, atrocities continue in Darfur, and last month the Uyghur Tribunal’s judgment in London found beyond reasonable doubt that the People’s Republic of China is responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity and torture in Xinjiang region. Its findings were supported by this House in the debate led by my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani). In each of those cases, we see what happens when the powerless cry for help and the powerful fail to answer.

On Holocaust Memorial Day, it is appropriate that we reflect on the atrocities of the past to draw connections with those of the present. While Britain is, as I can attest from my own family, one of the most welcoming places for Jews anywhere in the world, antisemitism is on the rise at home. This year, the Community Security Trust found that anti-Jewish hate incidents rose by 49%.

[Shailesh Vara (North West Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

On the issue of rising antisemitism, does my right hon. Friend agree that it is very good that there are opportunities for schoolchildren to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, to see personally the horrors that were inflicted on those poor people, and that that is something that should be encouraged, to ensure that more people understand the reality of what happened? May I also just compliment him on managing to secure this debate and on his very powerful speech?

[Robert Jenrick]

I thank my hon. Friend, and return to my thanks to and support of the Holocaust Educational Trust, which sends hundreds of thousands of our young people to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. I hope this Government will continue to support the trust, as previous Governments did, enabling those visits to continue.

Social media is fuelled with antisemitic hatred, with conspiracy theorists growing their followers daily. According to research published last year by the Antisemitism Policy Trust, there were up to half a million explicitly antisemitic tweets per year made viewable to UK users. During the pandemic, we have seen the use and abuse of holocaust language and imagery, with anti-lockdown protesters carrying signs reading “Vaccine Holocaust” and wearing the Star of David. In May last year, we saw a convoy of vehicles drive through north London with speakers blasting out antisemitic slurs and threats against Jews. In December, the passengers on a bus in Oxford Street, who had been celebrating Hanukkah, were subjected to vile and frightening abuse, with racists banging shoes against the bus.