Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Monday 26th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure and a privilege to follow the right reverend Prelate, and I congratulate her on her excellent and poignant maiden speech. As we have heard, she joins us with a wealth of pastoral experience, both in her current role, since 2025, as the 10th Bishop of Coventry, and in a variety of positions before that, ranging from Burgess Hill to Bradford, and Guildford to Uganda.

As a severely disabled Member of the House, I particularly welcome the right reverend Prelate’s interest in and commitment to supporting disabled people, including by running the London marathon for Mencap in 2022. I cannot think of a better preparation for life in your Lordships’ House, where I am afraid she will find that the glacial speed with which any Government move makes having plenty of stamina a prerequisite for getting anything done. She may find that she has an advantage because, as she will know, the Spirit can move far more quickly than us mere humans.

That reminds me, as someone who joined the Movement for the Ordination of Women when I was at university in the early 1990s, of a beautiful verse from chapter 9 of the Book of Wisdom, with which the right reverend Prelate may well be familiar. It is addressed to God, and it reads:

“With you is wisdom, who knows your works, and was present when you made the world, and who understands what is pleasing in your sight and what is right according to your commandments. Send her forth from the holy heavens and from the throne of your glory send her that she may be with me and toil … for she knows and understands all things, and she will guide me wisely in my actions”.


Quite apart from exposing the absurdity of viewing God purely as male, I cannot think of a more powerful affirmation of the multidimensional nature of God, embodying spiritually all that is beautiful in his creation of humanity, including she as much as he. I cannot promise the right reverend Prelate that your Lordships’ House will always do as she advises, but we look forward to benefiting from her wisdom.

There is something else that strikes me as absurd, and which I find completely counterintuitive: our implicit construction, as a society, of a hierarchy of racism. Hitler could not have been clearer: his fanatical hatred of the Jews informed the 1935 Nuremberg laws, which classified Jews as

“enemies of the race-based state”.

That racist hatred, in turn, informed the genocidal logic of the Shoah, or Holocaust. In other words, everything revolved around race. Yet, here we are, 81 years on from the Soviet Army’s liberation of Auschwitz, still mouthing with sincerity the mantra of “Never again”, but not calling out the attack of 7 October 2023, the banning of the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, the attack on Heaton Park synagogue, the Bondi Beach shooting or the prevention of Damien Egan, in the other place, from addressing pupils of a school in his own constituency. We are not calling out these events for what they are: racist.

If Hitler knew what it was about—and as my noble friend Lord Pickles reminded us, it was about race—why do we not? After all, within 20 years of the liberation of Auschwitz, your Lordships’ House had passed the Race Relations Act 1965, which, as noble Lords will know, made the promotion of hatred on the grounds of race, colour, and ethnic or national origins an offence. The toxic abuse and now murderous violence being visited on our Jewish communities, such as in Manchester, clearly violates the Act. Unless we are saying that the Act applies only to skin colour—which would be factually incorrect—this is racism, pure and simple, so why does society seem to pretend that it is not?

What sort of message are we sending to our beloved Holocaust survivors when, instead of the theory of “Never again”, they see only the beginnings of “Yet again”? What about impressionable young people who get most of their news, as we heard earlier, from social media? The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is bridging generations. What sort of bridge are we building when we fail to call out racism and our police imply, as happened on camera, “Well, it depends on the context”. Really? So it is okay to be racist if it is not about skin colour, or it involves abusing Jewish people or Israel.

I fear we are in danger of legitimising racist prejudice by default. As the Minister said in her powerful opening remarks, the Holocaust had its roots in prejudice that began with words. Deborah Lipstadt tells us:

“Anyone who thinks this only impacts Jews is ignoring reality. This is an attack on Western liberalism, democracy, and international security and stability”.


We can be sure that, even as we speak in this debate, there are those who are determined that the answer to the question posed by the Daily Telegraph, “Should Jews feel safe in Britain?”, should be a resounding “No”. These racists must not be allowed to achieve their goal, for the cost of surrendering to such a racist creed is far greater than the millions spent on policing the demonstrations that have paralysed our capital city weekend after weekend.

In conclusion, my childhood Jewish refugee surgeon, Hanuš Weisl, fled for his life as a teenager from racism: a racism that would kill all the relatives who came to see him depart on the last train out of Prague before the Nazis closed the border. Surely, we owe it to him today to take stronger action to ensure that racism, in all its forms, is confronted with the full force of the law, so that “Never again” never becomes “Yet again”.