Why the wrong memorial will water down the Holocaust

Telegraph

09-06-2025

On Wednesday, the Holocaust Memorial Bill returns to the House of Lords. What a waste of energy over seven and more years this project has been. The motives are good. Unfortunately, the idea is not. In the great battle against growing anti-Semitism in our society, precious weapons are being mistargeted.
There are strong second-order objections to the memorial and its accompanying 'learning centre'. They include the vast cost, over £200 million; the lack of room in Victoria Tower Gardens and the loss of green space; the security risk at the heart of government and Parliament which the police and parliamentary authorities increasingly fail to control; and the fact that the gardens will soon be overcrowded by the overspill for the coming 30-year project to restore the fabric of the Houses of Parliament next door.
There will be parliamentary amendments tomorrow to address these last two points. Most of the Bill's opponents, many of whom are Jewish, do want a memorial, but a much smaller and more beautiful one. The present design is a grandiose hand-me-down, by the somewhat discredited architect David Adjaye, already used elsewhere.
Opponents also do not want the learning centre. Tristram Hunt, the distinguished director of the V&A, thinks it could be much better managed at the Imperial War Museum.
The key objection relates to what is really being commemorated. If you track the history of Holocaust Memorial Day since it was instituted a quarter of a century ago, you will find increasing pressure to water down the concept. There have been several occasions – ITV's Good Morning Britain this year, for example – in which coverage has entirely failed to mention the Jews at all, let alone the fact that the Holocaust killed six million of them.
People such as the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, unfailingly hostile to Israel and previously friendly to murderous Hamas, have thus found it possible to take part in Holocaust Memorial Day without having to confront the grim truth of history.
Over time, the uniqueness of the Jewish experience thus slips away. A process begins in which the word 'Holocaust' is taken to stand for any persecution of any group by any other group. From there, it is a short step to suggesting, as pro-Gaza mobs always do, that Israel itself is committing genocide against Palestinians.
This is not an isolated outbreak of a few fanatics, but a deliberate plan to strip the Jewish state – and all Jews – of their moral authority. The ultimate aim is to preach the equation 'Jews = Israel = Nazis'. This libel is so widespread as to have become one of the main tropes of anti-Semitism.
The danger is that the wrong sort of commemoration will facilitate this. Delegations from anti-Israel countries and 'humanitarian' organisations emerging from Parliament will stroll into Victoria Tower Gardens, pose outside the Holocaust Memorial and deliver their piece to camera about alleged war crimes, starvation of children etc. You can just imagine the ineffable Greta Thunberg doing exactly that.
Sad to say, both main political parties are putting on whips to get the memorial Bill through Parliament. This suggests an underlying uncertainty about the rightness of their cause. Traditionally, votes on matters of conscience are not whipped. Surely Holocaust commemoration is a classic conscience issue in which party considerations have no place.
I fear that establishment politicians, frightened of being labelled anti-Semitic, have supported this great big project without thinking about it. Yet thought is exactly what is needed to correct the errors of Holocaust education today.
By the way, there exists a splendid role model for commemoration in, of all places, Poland. The POLIN museum in Warsaw movingly and expertly relates its country's part of the full story we all need to know – how Jews lived there for a thousand years and how, in the end, and most horribly, they died.
Weathering the storm
Like many parishes, our village held its annual fete last Saturday. The problem, in advance, was the weather.
Nowadays, weather forecasting is so much more accurate that if it says, two or three days before, that it will rain, it probably will. So event-planners must take it seriously. This avoids the occasional spectacular washouts of the past, after which everyone used to say, through gritted teeth, 'Rain failed to dampen the spirits'.
Our organisers therefore did the prudent thing and announced that the fete would not be held in the public garden by the church but in the village's two interconnected halls.
The trouble was that, on the day, there was virtually no rain during the fete's opening hours. We all felt slightly silly because we could have stuck with the original plan and saved ourselves a lot of trouble. Should we have followed the old way and just held the thing outdoors, rain or shine?
I am not sure of the answer. But I do know that everyone enjoyed the make-do atmosphere among the crowded stalls and the noisy Punch-and-Judy show inside, finding community in adversity. Business was brisk.
The splash headline in our local paper says, 'Post office to remain open'. My first reaction was to laugh at this non-news. After all, it is in the nature of shops to open.
But I quickly realised I was wrong. It was indeed news. The unspoken policy of the modern Post Office is to close itself down. A decision in the opposite direction certainly deserves the front page.