Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Verdirame Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 11th June 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Verdirame]

4: After Clause 2, insert the following new Clause—
“Learning Centre purposeThe sole purpose of any Learning Centre must be the provision of education about the genocide of the Jews and antisemitism.”

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group. The first is Amendment 4, and then I have an amendment to that amendment. I have been advised that in these cases it is best first to move the amendment and then to give my main speech on the amendment to the amendment. I beg to move.

Amendment 4A (to Amendment 4)

Moved by

[Lord Verdirame]

4A: Leave out “genocide of the Jews” and insert “Holocaust”

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, Amendment 4, as amended by Amendment 4A, is a limited but important amendment. It clarifies the purpose of the learning centre. At present the Bill says only that there should be

“a centre for learning relating to the memorial”.

The Explanatory Notes add:

“The Learning Centre’s exhibition will explore the part played by Britain’s Parliament and democratic institutions in response to the persecution of the Jewish people and other groups both at the time and subsequently. It will help people understand the way the lessons of the Holocaust apply more widely, including to other genocides”.


At Second Reading, the Minister said:

“The learning centre will also address subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur”.—[Official Report, 4/9/24; col. 1224.]


The website of the Holocaust memorial says that the learning centre is going to provide an honest reflection of Britain’s role surrounding the Holocaust as well as reflecting on subsequent genocides.

We had an interesting and useful briefing with Martin Winstone, the project historian for the Holocaust memorial and learning centre. I am grateful to him for his time and expertise, and I am grateful to the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Khan, for organising that briefing and for his patient and dedicated engagement on the Bill. Martin Winstone reassured us that he and other historians involved in the project are very clear that the focus of the learning centre will be the Holocaust and, in particular, Britain’s role. I have no reason to doubt that commitment and, of course, their expertise.

I also appreciate that it is not the role of Parliament to curate the content of a learning centre or a museum, but it is the role of Parliament to tell those who will curate a learning centre created by Parliament what lessons Parliament thinks must be taught. This is particularly the case given that organisations change over time. The people who are in charge and sit on the various boards today will at some point be replaced. Organisational drift—that is, slow deviation from the organisation’s intended goals—will happen. It always does. At the moment, neither what I see in the Bill and the Explanatory Notes nor what I have heard and read from the historians reassures me that there is the clarity required to prevent this. I am particularly concerned that the various references to subsequent persecution and other genocides foretell that before too long, notwithstanding all the good intentions, this learning centre, unless firmly anchored by Parliament, will also drift.

I am not saying that Britain’s response to subsequent persecutions is not an important topic—it is—nor suggesting that it would not be important to educate people about other horrific atrocities. It would be. In fact, one of my concerns is that we should respect the historical complexity of other atrocities. My first job in academia, as a researcher at the Refugee Studies Programme in Oxford, involved interviewing Rwandans in east Africa in the aftermath of that genocide. Not only was that a harrowing experience but it was intellectually a humbling experience because after months of research on the Rwandan genocide and meeting many Rwandans, I still felt that I had barely begun to understand Rwandan society.

The point is that Rwanda, like Darfur or Cambodia, has a very complex history that would have to be told properly, not as an appendix to the Holocaust and not on the false premise that there are parallels between, say, the Weimar Republic and the regime of Juvénal Habyarimana. Yes, in a legal sense, crimes under international law were committed in all these situations, but the centre does not purport to be—nor, in my view, should it be—a learning centre about international criminal law. Our amendment would give a clear and well-defined purpose to the learning centre to educate people about the Holocaust and about antisemitism. The amendment responds to a basic pedagogic rationale for any learning enterprise: knowing in advance what lessons we are seeking to teach.

In that respect, I am grateful to the noble Lords who in Committee pointed out that the first formulation for this amendment was inadequate. We have reflected on those comments, particularly with the amendment to the amendment, and we now have, I think, the right language, which includes killings by collaborators of the Nazi regime as well as the genocidal persecution of other groups, such as the Roma.

There is a profound moral rationale behind this amendment. It would address the risk of the learning centre drifting into other messages, as I have said, and it is a risk that is neither theoretical nor abstract. We have already had instances of Holocaust commemorations forgetting about the Jews or of such events being used as platforms for other messages. With this amendment, Parliament would send a clear signal that whatever the disagreements about the memorial itself might be, there would have to be none of this nonsense in this learning centre willed by Parliament and right next to Parliament.

As Stephen Pollard, who wrote in support of our amendment in the Spectator today, said:

“This is not about some contest of suffering in which the Jews are declared the winner”.


The amendment is seeking precisely to pre-empt this kind of absurd contest. The risk of losing focus and drifting into other messages is particularly acute given that, at the international level, genocide is being invoked more frequently now than ever before. Before the International Court of Justice there are disputes under the genocide convention between Ukraine and Russia, South Africa and Israel, and Gambia and Myanmar. Also, Sudan recently submitted a dispute against the UAE under the genocide convention. Every international lawyer can explain that the reason for this proliferation of genocide in international litigation and politics is that the genocide convention is often the only legal route available for submitting a dispute to the International Court of Justice. It is certainly the one with the greatest political effect.

Our amendment contemplates a lesson beyond the Holocaust about which the learning centre should seek to educate visitors. It is the most obvious lesson that should accompany Holocaust education: educating about antisemitism. The rise of antisemitism is one of the great moral failures of our times. In our country 33% of religious hate crimes recorded in the year ending March 2024 targeted Jews, who make up barely 0.3% of the British population. According to the latest Global 100 survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, 46% of the world’s adult population—an estimated 2.2 billion people—harbour deeply entrenched antisemitic attitudes. This has more than doubled since the Anti-Defamation League’s first worldwide survey a decade ago, and is the highest level on record since the Anti-Defamation League started tracking these trends globally.

We all know that this memorial could become a focal point for protest and controversy. The least we can do as parliamentarians is to try to nip these controversies in the bud. To do so we need the moral clarity and the moral courage to say that this learning centre, if it is to happen at all, must be about the Holocaust and about antisemitism, and to put this in law.

The fact that both Holocaust denial and antisemitism are rising—especially among the young, as we have seen—shows that our education is failing. The only point of a new learning centre is if it is ready to confront that failure and tackle those two challenges head on. There are of course many other important lessons that we can teach but this should not be the place for them. With so many in our society who still have so much to learn about the Holocaust and antisemitism, it is surely not too much to ask that the learning centre devoted to the victims of the Holocaust should concentrate on these two educational missions and nothing else. I beg to move.

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 4 and 4A, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame.

This has been a passionate debate. It is possible to believe that in the course of time a memorial and a learning centre will be established in Victoria Tower Gardens, they will be a great success and we will all look back and wonder what the fuss was all about, but it is also possible to believe that that will not be the case. If passions continue to run high, I suspect they will be fuelled by a single word: genocide.

I will not repeat the arguments that I made at Second Reading about how the word “genocide” is now contested—a few moments ago the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, put the case more eloquently than I possibly could—but I will leave a single example hanging in the air, having made the observation that it is probably impossible to wage a modern war in which, tragically, there are mass civilian casualties without incurring accusations of genocide, as Israel is currently discovering in Gaza. What I say next, I say with no reference in particular to war in the Middle East or anywhere else, but war crimes are sometimes conflated with genocide, as are crimes against humanity. Appalling and horrendous though both are, genocide is the ultimate crime because it is the attempted extermination of an entire people. In short, I am concerned about mission creep in the learning centre over time.

I pause to pay tribute to the Minister, who I have always found to be extremely helpful. He organised the useful briefing to which the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, has just referred, with Martin Winstone, the project historian. He gave a most impressive presentation—the academics who are advising the project are extremely eminent—and I understood for the first time when the briefing was being given why the Minister specifically referenced Darfur and Rwanda at Second Reading, because it is the Holocaust that set the standard by which horrors since have been weighed, both legally and in other ways, as genocides. I can see all that, and he made a very good case, but Governments change and the Minister will not be here for ever—sadly. What the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, just said about the wording of the Bill and the Explanatory Notes is correct. For all the persuasiveness and attraction of the presentation that we were given, there is as yet no actual content of the learning centre for us to be able to judge. So I would like noble Lords to think of Amendment 4A as a kind of safeguard.

Other amendments this evening, as the debate has gone to and fro, have been characterised as wrecking amendments because they seek to separate the learning centre from the memorial. I make no comment on those debates one way or the other, but the one thing that cannot possibly be said about the amendment is that it is a wrecking amendment. It accepts that there will be a memorial and a learning centre together in Victoria Tower Gardens. It simply seeks to set some guardrails around the content. Were it a wrecking amendment, my noble friend on the Front Bench would not be supporting it, as I understand is the case.

That leads me back to the Minister. I think I know where our Front Bench stands; I now want to hear, when the Minister responds to the debate, what he has to say. I think he is sympathetic to the argument that the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, put and which the amendment stands for. I am hoping that he can satisfy us. If he cannot do that now, it is possible he will be able to do that at Third Reading, but I do not know. If he cannot, and the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, seeks to move the amendment to a vote, I hope that noble Lords will vote in favour.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, there will be future discussions about the governance of the learning centre—those are the safeguards. For now, because I do not want to prolong the House any longer, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am grateful to everyone who spoke. I will briefly make a few points in reply. First, I have no problem at all with the individuals sitting on the academic advisory board; they are all very eminent. I am certainly glad to hear about the involvement from Yad Vashem.

The composition of boards changes over time: different individuals will come on board with different agendas. This is an opportunity for Parliament to set the agenda, and whoever comes on board will have to stick to that agenda set by Parliament.

On whether it is unnecessary, as the Minister said, I have to disagree. It is necessary because we have already seen some drift into other persecution and genocides in the Explanatory Notes, and that is why it is necessary. I do not quite see how it can be described as too narrow. The purpose would be education about the Holocaust and antisemitism. They are two pretty big missions, and we are not doing so well in respect of either of them.

Further, of course commemorations could take place because we are building a memorial commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, so it will be possible in this building to have commemorations. In addition, the fact that the amendment refers to education, which is a broad concept, also enables commemoration as part of education.

I have a lot of sympathy, as he knows, with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, about the inclusion of homosexual victims of the Holocaust. I never had any doubt that individuals who were wearing a pink star in Auschwitz were victims of the Holocaust. I considered, with other Members involved in the drafting of this amendment, alternative versions, and as the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, said, we went through a bit of a journey with the formulation. In the end, we thought Holocaust was the obvious term because it is what the memorial is about: it is a memorial about the victims of the Holocaust. I see that term as inclusive of other groups persecuted and taken to concentration and extermination camps. I am very glad that he raised that point.

Finally, I agree with everything the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, said on legal challenges, but I was a little baffled by the idea that there could be a legal challenge about the meaning of Holocaust. That legal challenge could be brought now because the Bill provides for

“expenditure … in connection with … a memorial commemorating the victims of the Holocaust”.

If somebody wanted to bring a challenge on the basis that the Holocaust is something else, they could probably already do it now. The amendment will not in any way widen the scope for such legal challenges, but it will afford a degree of protection against the risk of mission creep and of this learning centre starting to do things that we all know it is not supposed to do. With that in mind, I have listened to the Minister carefully, but I am afraid I wish to test the opinion of the House.