The Holocaust memorial and learning centre that the government wants to build in public gardens adjoining the Palace of Westminster is “too small for its purpose and too big for the park”, Sir Peter Bottomley MP told a Commons select committee last week.
But, as Bottomley made very clear, those were not his words. The longest-serving MP was quoting Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, now 98 and herself a living Holocaust memorial.
Lasker-Wallfisch survived nearly a year in Auschwitz because she had been forced to play in the camp orchestra. “As long as the Germans wanted an orchestra, it would have been counter-productive to kill us,” she recalled. Deported to Bergen-Belsen, she was liberated by British troops in 1945 and moved to London the following year. I first learned about her extraordinary resilience when her son, the celebrated cellist Raphael Wallfisch, overlapped with me at school.
Tomorrow, she and other Holocaust survivors will tell the Commons committee why they oppose Michael Gove’s Holocaust Memorial Bill. They have been invited to give evidence by Baroness Deech. She, like me, lost grandparents in the Holocaust and she, like me, thinks that Victoria Tower Gardens is the wrong place for a Holocaust memorial.
Another lawyer whose close family were Holocaust victims is Lord Carlile of Berriew KC. His opposition to a memorial adjoining parliament is based on the decade he spent as the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation and his current work as a security consultant.
The proposed site “presents a very real terrorism risk”, he told the committee last week. “I suggest that recent events in Israel-Palestine cannot be ignored. They have heightened the danger of action against perceived Jewish interests in London and sadly may have diluted public support… for having such a memorial and centre so close to the Palace of Westminster.”
Carlile mentioned two examples — “one big, one tiny”. Earlier this month, he noted, six people were arrested over an alleged plot to shut down the London Stock Exchange. The Express, which exposed the alleged conspiracy, said it had been organised by pro-Palestinian activists.
His second observation was that the parliamentary gift shop across the road from the Palace of Westminster had recently boarded up all its windows. “I am absolutely certain,” he said, “that that will have been on the basis of advice that they should protect themselves from demonstrators and from others who might be malignly concerned about parliament and about all things connected with the Holocaust as well.”
If the government’s plans went ahead, it would not just be visitors to the memorial and learning centre who would be “subjected to electronic and intrusive personal searches”. Carlile thought the entire public park might have to be treated as a high-level security risk.
“There is a real and present and serious prospect that that the site would be regarded as iconic and as tempting by both Islamist and right-wing extremists,” he told MPs, “given its proximity to this palace and to the lack of any secure or meaningful perimeter and its close proximity both to busy public highways and the river.”
And there was already a view among his fellow parliamentarians that the current perimeter of the parliamentary estate was too small to protect MPs and peers from the threat of terrorism. It had been suggested that the boundary should extend as far as Lambeth Bridge, which would presumably bring the site of the proposed memorial within a controlled zone.
The government’s response to Carlile, expressed by junior counsel to Gove’s levelling-up department, was that these were matters to be decided as part of its application for planning permission. They were not the concern of the committee.
There had been a similar response to evidence earlier in the day from Nickie Aiken MP, whose constituency includes the proposed site, and Louise Hyams, the Westminster councillor for the ward that covers the gardens. Neither supported the government’s plans.
On behalf of the levelling-up department, Christopher Katkowski KC made it clear that there was nothing for him to respond to and certainly no need for the department to call any evidence. “Everything you have heard is absolutely nothing to do with the scope of the business of this committee and that is all I want to say,” he told the committee.
Comment
Katkowski’s response is entirely consistent with parliamentary procedures and, no doubt, his instructions. But we are dealing here with politics, not law. Brushing aside people’s deeply held views is not a good look, even if the House of Commons has ruled that they are irrelevant.
This weekend will mark the eighth anniversary of the government’s announcement of a memorial at Victoria Tower Gardens. Ministers should stop to think why some of those with first-hand experience of the Holocaust are so opposed to what the government has tried so hard to do for so long and with so little success.
The government was defeated in the House of Lords on its Rwanda plans by 214 votes to 171 last night. Peers backed a motion moved by Lord Goldsmith KC on behalf of the Lords international agreements committee which said that the government “should not ratify the Rwanda treaty until parliament is satisfied that the protections it provides have been fully implemented”.
If any unaffiliated peers were unsure about whether to vote against the government, they will have been persuaded to do so by the Home Office minister Lord Sharpe of Epsom. He rattled through his speech as if he didn’t understand a word of it, losing his place several times. He completely failed to answer interventions. He made party-political comments in response to the unanimous report of an all-party Lords committee. And he misrepresented comments by opposition peers.
One example will suffice. Lord Razzall, a Liberal Democrat member of the international agreements committee, spoke of the government’s dilemma:
If we go back to the beginning, the whole reason for the proposal to send people to Rwanda was that it was going to be such a hellhole that nobody would want to get on a boat if they thought they were going to go to Rwanda. The dilemma the government now face is that, because of the Supreme Court, they have to demonstrate what a wonderful, safe place Rwanda is. I wonder whether this might just be a moment for them to reflect on the purpose of their policy.
Sharpe seized on the word “hellhole”, saying he found it “quite offensive”. But Razzall had not said Rwanda was a hellhole any more than he had said it was a wonderful, safe place. The minister had completely missed the point.
For an analysis of what the government defeat will mean, see my preview published yesterday:
I believe that Professor Sommer is right concerning the proposed memorial.
Just HOW MANY further measured and valid objections to the instant site need to be raised and in some cases re-iterated for Mr. Gove and others directly responsible to take pause and genuinely revisit its selection- genuinely rather than just having gone through the motions.
As to the resounding Lords vote in favour of Lord Goldsmith’s second motion, the numbers rather speak for themselves, surely.
But, what a telling, sarcastic turn of phrase Lord Razzall employed, leading as it did to Lord Sharpe letting slip the threadbare and self contradicting nature of the entire Rwanda “policy.”
Although this might be dismissed as a planning issue as opposed to being a topic for primary legislation, if the aim of the memorial and its attendant centre is to attract visitors - Westminster is already heavily crowded with tourists (as well as people visiting Parliament). Quiet realisation and contemplation is going to be difficult to achieve. Have a token statue in central London as for other memorials by all means but have your education centre where there is proper access.