80th Anniversary of Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan

Lord Bates Excerpts

Friday 9th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates (Con)]

The greatest generation, whose sacrifice and service we remember this week, not only secured for us a victory over tyranny but gave us the political and diplomatic tools and institutions that would avoid its repetition. The military victories won the war, but it is the often unnoticed diplomatic victories which have secured the peace.

When Britian stood alone and London was being pounded in the Blitz, this city was home to nine Governments in exile. On 12 June 1941, they joined together with representatives of Britain, Canada, Australia and South Africa as the London International Assembly at St James’s Palace to declare that

“the only true basis of enduring peace is the willing co-operation of free peoples in a world … relieved of the menace of aggression”.

This declaration was developed further two months later in a meeting between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in Newfoundland when they signed the Atlantic Charter, which would later be signed by 26 other nations. Over the next two years this was developed further, and the foundations of the United Nations began to take shape, culminating in the Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization at Dumbarton Oaks, with much of the preparatory work carried out here in Westminster in Church House.

This was about not just institutions and charters but mechanisms for resolving disputes between nations by law, not war, and holding those who commit war crimes to account. On 7 October 1942, the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Simon, spoke in your Lordships’ House and announced the formation of the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes. This led to the London agreement and charter, signed on 8 August 1945 at Church House, which helped to establish the principles of international law and created the first international criminal court at Nuremberg.

Given this pivotal role in the foundation of the United Nations, it was agreed that the ideal venue for the first meetings of both the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council would be London, and they took place in January 1946. On the eve of the General Assembly, His Majesty King George VI hosted delegates from 51 countries at a banquet in St James’s Palace and said that, in the long course of history,

“no more important meeting has … taken place”

in this city. He was right. The venues for the General Assembly and the Security Council had been chosen personally by the then Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. He chose Methodist Central Hall for the General Assembly and Church House for the Security Council because, in his words, he wanted venues that had been “bathed in prayer”.

The remarkable role of this great city and this great country in shaping the post-war political, diplomatic and legal order is something which is worth celebrating, because when politicians, diplomats and institutions do their job, we spare our courageous Armed Forces the enormous cost of doing theirs. But these institutions cannot exist only on paper; they must act in practice. No one nation, no matter how great, can do it alone, and no nation, no matter how small, can stand aside from its responsibility. Yet, those institutions also established a world in which rights and responsibilities were no longer vested solely in sovereign states but in individual human beings and in all human beings.

Will the Minister therefore consider inviting the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council to return to London in January 2026 to mark the 80th anniversary of this great diplomatic victory, so that we can collectively rededicate ourselves to the vision of the United Nations charter, which speaks so profoundly to the world of today when it says:

“WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small … AND FOR THESE ENDS to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security”?


When we honour those words, we honour their memory.