Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 11th June 2025 Lords Chamber

My third question to the Minister is a very simple and practical one. Where is the model that was here in the Royal Gallery last week? Again, many noble Lords will not have seen it, and many noble Lords will not have read the full report, which describes exactly what this memorial is like. If the Minister, his colleagues and the promoters of this project are proud of the project, why is the model not there right now for us all to go out and look at, to be sure whether we consider it to be the right kind in the right place or not? It must have cost a lot of money to make that model, and it is not here today. I think that says something about the confidence that the Minister and promoters have in the project they are asking us to support.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

The core of the problem is that the learning centre is too cramped, small and poky. I do not think it should be underground, but the real problem is that it is too small to tell such a huge story. What we have is a site that is too small for the Shoah but a project that is too big for the site. The learning centre is what really matters.

My credentials to speak are not nearly as good as others. My father was an Army doctor at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, but he never told us anything about it, so shocked was he by what he saw. I learned about his role there—I think he was the first Army doctor in—only after he was dead. I think that he would have said that what matters most of all is the education, and for that you really do need a lecture theatre and libraries as well as electronics and computer desks. A tourist exhibit down a hole in the gardens does not match up to what one is looking for from an education centre.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I will address directly the question that my noble friend posed on why collocation is important and why this is the right location. I would just like to dispel a couple of myths in this debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Russell, for bringing it, and I think it is a very important and measured debate that we are having. It is an honour to contribute to it at all.

As I said, I have been on the Holocaust Memorial Foundation for a decade. That is my only lived experience of this. But what I have learned in that decade from sitting alongside real experts in Holocaust education is that it is so important that we feel this, as well as learning facts. I remind noble Lords that the leaders of all Holocaust education organisations in this country believe that this is the right place, the right size and the right way to do this as a national memorial. They know a thousandfold or a millionfold more than I do. I have watched them at work over the course of the last decade and I think that we should respect them, as my noble friend Lord Howard said earlier.

It will not be a tribute to British greatness—quite the opposite. It will ask us to think very deeply about Britain’s role in the Holocaust. There are some things that we can proud of but lots that we cannot. I would argue that, tempting though it is to believe that this is like the Cenotaph and that we would walk past and feel the pain of the victims and their families, actually the most difficult part of Holocaust education is not to think, “Oh my God, it could be my family who were victims”. The most difficult part of Holocaust education is to ask yourself “Could you have been a perpetrator?” That is the lesson that could not be more important today.

The sad thing is that, with every week that I have been on the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, it has felt more important that, as a country, we ask people to think about that. Collocating the memorial and the learning centre in the shadow of the Mother of Parliaments, where so many people have fought for liberty and freedom, is why it is the right place at the right time.