Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Moore of Etchingham Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 11th June 2025 Lords Chamber

The nature of antisemitism, of which ignorance or even denial towards the Holocaust is a part, will not be countered by a proposal that few people want in a site that is difficult for large numbers to visit and raises real security issues. It is better by far to identify a facility and an artwork on a scale that is fitting and at least to consider, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, said, linking it with a renaissance of the Jewish Museum. I support the amendment.

[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.