Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Evans of Rainow Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 11th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I warmly endorse the amendment and the speeches by the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, and the right reverend Prelate. I briefly invite your Lordships to make a comparison in order to understand how we might look at this issue. It is a comparison we can make with our own eyes when we travel in this part of London every day, because we can walk past the Cenotaph.

Even before the First World War came to a conclusion, people thought very hard about how to remember it and how to pay the right tribute and get the right amount of information to preserve it with memorials and so on. The Imperial War Museum was conceived before the war ended in 1917 and the Cenotaph was erected as early as 1922, so people moved faster in those days when they thought about these matters, but they thought very hard. One of the things that people such as Rudyard Kipling, Fabian Ware and of course Lutyens were debating was: what are we trying to say? They tried to work it out very carefully before they said it, and I think we have been doing the process backwards.

In the Cenotaph you have a beautiful simplicity that is very carefully thought about. It is a monument to the dead and all it says is, “The Glorious Dead”. It does not even say, “Our Glorious Dead”, or “The Dead of the British Empire”. It says, “The Glorious Dead”, and that is it. Everybody who has walked past it ever since has thought about that. Indeed, in the days when men wore hats, they always took off their hats to it as they passed. At the same time, quite separately but with similar motives, people thought about how to commemorate it in the sense of learning and historical thought and evidence, and there you have the Imperial War Museum.

There is no reason to believe that the commemorative memorial idea should physically go with the learning idea. In this case, for all sorts of reasons adumbrated, that is physically difficult as well. I ask us to learn from that very beautiful example and to apply it to a situation and a subject that is equally important and equally tragic.

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Russell. I was not aware of his grandfather, but I have made a note and I am certainly going to purchase his book, The Scourge of the Swastika. A memorial without a learning centre would fail to meet the objectives of the Prime Minister’s commission of 10 years ago in 2015. The report promised for us to remember and, as was mentioned earlier, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said that it is

“the right idea, in the right place and at the right time”.—[Official Report, 4/9/24; col. 1169.]

That was the Prime Minister in 2015. The Prime Minister for the 2017 general election, the noble Baroness, Lady May, agreed with that, as did subsequent Prime Ministers in 2019 and 2024. The Conservatives and Labour had this proposal in their manifestos.

The other place has voted on this, so now it has come to this House. This House is a revising Chamber. Some of the amendments may be well intentioned but, from listening to them, I think some of them are meant to wreck the Bill, because a memorial without the learning centre, as I say, would not work. Without an integral learning centre, the memorial would lack context. We would miss the opportunity to help millions of visitors learn the facts of the Holocaust and its significance for Britain.

The noble Lord, Lord Moore, mentioned how the Cenotaph came about. As we walk past, we see “The Glorious Dead”, and, as he rightly says, those who served in the First and Second World Wars would know about that. But we are talking about the future here. The generations to come—our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren—need to be educated on what happened. That is the whole point of having this centre there. It is fanciful to suggest that a learning centre could be placed elsewhere without losing this opportunity for visitors to learn.

Abandoning the proposed design for Victoria Tower Gardens would mean setting the programme back many years. Perhaps that is the intent of the amendment. It is wholly unrealistic to imagine that a new site in any remotely suitable location would gather universal support. We would at best spend many more years facing and listening to objections from a new set of voices. I am sorry to say that, but it is the feeling that I have. The Government are right to bring this to the House as previous Governments have done, so I will not be supporting this amendment.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I am asked two questions that I always find really irritating. The first is whether I am Jewish and, if I am not, why I am interested in this. The second is, “What got you interested in the Holocaust?” I can tell the House that when I was 10 years old, in 1962, my grandfather got me as a birthday present a copy of The Scourge of the Swastika, which I read from cover to cover. It put the living daylights into me and I have always been fascinated by it. I am sorry that I had not made the connection with the noble Lord. It is a wonderful contribution not just to this country’s history but to its literature.

The noble Baroness made an important point about the loss of the Jewish Museum, which I mourn; I thought it was a really good museum. I am sure she was a regular visitor and I have to tell her that I was too. Without going into detail, there were some management problems that accelerated the problems there, but I make it clear that you can count me in for any revival of the Jewish Museum, because it is important. It fulfils the role that the noble Lord, Lord Moore, referred to in his excellent column about the importance of the POLIN museum in Warsaw. It is a wonderful museum about Polish life and about an understanding of the importance of Jewry in Poland. The hard truth is that the heart was ripped out of Poland by the Holocaust, and Poland has simply not recovered.

I hope noble Lords will not mind me reminding them that the POLIN museum is subterranean. I hope they will not mind me reminding them that the size of the Holocaust section of the POLIN museum is just fractionally larger than the learning centre proposed for Victoria Tower Gardens. I hope they will not be too upset if I remind them that the Berlin Holocaust museum, which goes along with that interesting memorial, is subterranean, and I hope they will not mind me reminding them that it is considerably smaller than the learning centre. Part of the Washington museum is subterranean and, when that museum decided to look at its country during the Holocaust, as we intend to look at ours, the size of its exhibit was smaller than ours. The proposed museum is not exceptionally small. If you look across the world, you will see that, by and large, it meets the numbers.

We have to make it clear that we have the full support of the Imperial War Museum to build it here. We have on the foundation people from the museum in Washington and from the 9/11 museum in New York. We have people who represent the Imperial War Museum. Forgive me, but I have learned throughout this debate what a distinguished historian is: it is a historian who agrees with you. We have a whole list of distinguished Holocaust historians on our academic board who support the memorial.

If we were now to say, “Let’s just build a memorial and find a learning centre elsewhere”, that would be a big missed opportunity, because we are living in a post-Holocaust world. We have just seen the election of a Polish President who has allegations against him of being a Holocaust denier. We cannot wait to do this. This would be an important global institution, and we should not throw it away.

I shall quote two small paragraphs from a letter that we have received from the Holocaust Education Trust, which each Member has received. It is from our friend Mala Tribich, the sister of the late Sir Ben Helfgott. She says:

“I was liberated in Bergen-Belsen by the exceptional British Army in 1945 and London has been my home for most of my life. It feels entirely fitting that a memorial should stand in the country that so many survivors are grateful to and have called their home. My brother and fellow survivor Sir Ben Helfgott … campaigned passionately for this national Holocaust Memorial and dreamed of seeing its opening—it saddens me that he did not live to see it come to pass. It is my hope I will be able to attend the opening and remember Ben and all the family we lost”.


Karen Pollock says in the same letter that more than 10 years ago the memorial was first proposed, and now is the time to act:

“Many survivors like Mala still dream of being present at its opening. Tragically, others—like Sir Ben Helfgott and Lily Ebert MBE—will never have that chance”.


If we split the memorial from the learning centre and do not go along with these proposals, it will be decades, or maybe never, before it is built, and that would be unforgivable.