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.