Kindertransport Commemoration

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Monday 26th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes (CB)]

My Lords, all noble Lords have begun their speech with a justified tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for the work that he has done. He is our moral leader in these matters and our provider of detailed information on the plight of refugees. We thank him for his unstinting work in doing this and for never giving up. The hesitations of government are one of the features that apply in every country, but the noble Lord carries on with this work and he has done so well. We thank him again for that and for initiating this debate.

I was Member of Parliament for Harrow East for 27 years, and every day I felt very proud of being the MP for that delightful area of north-west London. Because I am following the noble Lord, Lord Popat, I remember with great pride the moment when Ted Heath’s Government decided to designate Harrow and Leicester as the two main red-star centres to receive East African refugees escaping from Idi Amin. I have to say that we did have trouble from certain hard-faced people in the constituency—I will not say who—who did not like the idea at all. We insisted that they were coming and that we would accept 1,000 people to start with. The noble Lord, Lord Popat, was one of those who came, as we have discussed in debates before. I thank him for the contribution he has made in the House to these matters as well as to many others.

When those Asians came to Harrow, it became a much more dynamic place even than it already was. It was certainly dynamic without them, but with them coming, there was an extra élan in social and economic activity. We were forever grateful that they came, with their learning, experience, knowledge and business acumen—all of which were so important.

The noble Lord, Lord Popat, is sitting next to the noble Lord, Lord Polak. I remember with great pride that we worked together in the House of Commons, where he did unstinting and wonderful work for the Jewish community in Britain. We worked for Soviet Jewry, with Greville Janner and others, and to promote the good cause of the Jewish community.

There is a quarterly English-language newspaper in Germany, the Jewish Voice from Germany, which I read avidly. I have contributed some pieces, and, in one article, the question from the editor was: what has been the contribution of the Jewish community in Britain? I answered that it had been just magnificent. That has been the case over the centuries, because they were here many years ago, too, but also more recently it has been a wonderful thing.

As a European enthusiast, it gives me great pride to remind this House that, in Germany now, the Jewish community has become reinstated and is sizable and growing, not only in Berlin, Dusseldorf and other big cities but all over the country. It was great to see that, when Angela Merkel addressed the Knesset, she got a standing ovation. It is hard to believe, but in recent polls in Israel, Germany came out as the most popular foreign country.

All that is very positive, and it is because of the efforts of individual Members of this House, of politicians elsewhere and of government officials. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, is replying today, because he is a thoughtful and constructive Minister. We look forward to his reply and, I hope, to his responses to the points made by the noble Lords, Lord Alton and Lord Dubs, about Britain helping more in the global matter of refugees.

The second major point of pride for me as MP for Harrow is that, in 1987, we had the 50th anniversary of the Kindertransport in Harrow, with Tim Renton, the then Minister of State at the Home Office, representing the Government. It was a very moving occasion to see the gathering of the survivors of that Kindertransport. By then, some were very successful people—some were foolishly living in Palm Beach rather than in a respectable part of Florida—and they came from all over Britain, and from everywhere else, too. It was a great occasion, when we celebrated the survival of those who came because the Government and citizens demanded humanity in response to people facing such a dreadful plight.

I think also of the brave people in the occupied territories held by the Nazis, and indeed in Germany itself, who helped and sheltered Jews. In Germany and other places, it was a capital offence to do that. You had to be very brave to do so, and a lot of people were. That shows that humanity does come together when there are real exigencies, as the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, mentioned in the very moving cases he described. It shows that we need to open our hearts more about refugees and not have this rather hard attitude, which worries me, as it does the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, who talked about people not having a humanitarian response to those whose plight is grotesque, particularly those in the Middle East, from north Africa and elsewhere. That is not just important but primordial—the way that a civilised and wealthy country with our resources can respond appropriately in the future.