There is a plan for a new Holocaust memorial and an underground “learning centre” in Victoria Tower Gardens, a small park alongside Millbank, just behind parliament, which is about the size of three football pitches. It has several statues in it, the Burghers of Calais, a small memorial to Buxton the abolitionist, Emmeline Pankhurst, and a sizeable children’s playground.
It is the only green space near parliament, and near the office blocks and council flats stretching towards Pimlico. The memorial would overwhelm the park and disrupt the playground and its recreational use.
It would be the sixth major Holocaust memorial in the UK, alongside the ones in Nottinghamshire, Huddersfield, Hyde Park, the Imperial War Museum Holocaust exhibition (which has just had £30m spent on it), the Wiener Library in Bloomsbury and around 10 other smaller ones. The government has granted £75m towards construction and at least another £25m or so is expected in charitable donations, before considering running costs and maintenance. The National Audit Office has recently reported critically on the management failures of the project.
Westminster City Council refused to grant permission for the memorial, but politicians are trying to force it through. It would mean the loss of a park, whose green status is legally protected by a 1900 statute declaring it perpetually open. Twenty-seven per cent of the space would be lost, not to mention the queues, the food stalls, deliveries and security checks, and a cafe and a playground on top of a memorial to people who had no chance to play and who were starved to death. It is part of national planning policy that parks should be preserved, not destroyed, and they are needed more than ever since lockdown.
The design of the Westminster memorial comprises 23 bronze fins each seven metres high. They are said to represent the number of communities destroyed by the Nazis, which is incorrect because that number is indefinable. There would be no other outward symbol to tell you what it was that you were approaching. It looks like a fence, forbidding, not inviting or reverential. Abstract memorials are more likely to be treated with disrespect—the Berlin one, made of concrete slabs, is somewhere people go to picnic and lark around, not knowing what it is all about.
It is not a good idea, it seems to me, to force a Holocaust memorial into a place where it is not wanted. There are other sites. But objectors have been described as antisemitic, and considerable pressure has been placed by some politicians on the most reasonable of objectors. The word “sacred” is attached to the project in a way that enables objectors to be called “sacrilegious.” The Jewish community is in fact divided; the Board of Deputies has not voted on it; and it has become politicised.
The original Board of Deputies vision for a memorial, in its report of 2014, was for an expansion of the Imperial War Museum exhibition; it noted the inadequacy of Holocaust education and the need for restitution for victims of the Holocaust, primarily from Poland, which is still awaited. And it noted that modern antisemitism often takes the form of excessive attacks on the state of Israel. The memorial will not reflect either of these two contentious issues, and what it will add to Holocaust education is unknown.
The 2014 report was followed by the National Holocaust Memorial Foundation report the next year, which envisaged a place where people can pay their respects and pray, a lecture theatre, offices and space for gatherings of up to 500 people for commemorative events: none of those criteria are now met.
There are over 300 Holocaust memorials around the world, from China to New Zealand. Sadly, the countries which have the most, namely the United States and France, are also those that have seen the sharpest rise in antisemitic incidents.
The Westminster memorial is planned by a Board that is headed by Eric Pickles and Ed Balls, and includes Gerald Ronson, Natasha Kaplinsky, Dido Harding, and some financiers. They claim it has to be sited next to parliament, (albeit it would be on the wrong side, if you are walking towards it, as most do, from Whitehall or the underground), in order to make the point that democracy protects against genocide.
This is simply not the case. Jews have thrived in countries in the past where there was no democracy. The Holocaust did not take place because Germany was undemocratic at the outset, but because of centuries of racial and religious hatred across Europe, hatreds that are again simmering just under the surface of modern democracies.
The learning centre shies away from the real causes of Jew hatred. It is meant, according to David Cameron and other politicians who have espoused the cause, to be a statement of British values. In fact, this type of national ideology has been grafted on to Holocaust memorials around the world. They are increasingly used to promote a self-congratulatory and sometimes self-exculpatory image of the government that erects them.
It overlooks the exclusion from Britain of most refugees from Europe in the 1930s, and places emphasis only on the relatively small numbers in the Kindertransport. Not their parents and the tens of thousands of adults who were turned away. Not the internment camps, deportations and statelessness. Not the thousands who might have sought refuge in Palestine in the 1930s when Britain, as the mandatary power, kept the doors shut, and continued to block Jews from entering Palestine even after the war, even after the discovery of the concentration camps: the UK put Jewish refugees in displaced persons camps in Cyprus and Germany.
As the Holocaust memorial project has developed, increasing emphasis has been placed on the British values theme. It is an aim with which the leaders of the Holocaust Foundation have for long been associated, sometimes controversially. It is about embedding Britishness in school education, and, as PM Cameron explained, remembering the way Britain proudly stood up to Hitler. That is why the politicians want it sited, regardless of its appropriateness, next to parliament. They want it to be, as the latest evidence put it, “a permanent statement of our British values” and a “single place for visitors to reflect on the impact of the Holocaust in the UK and Britain’s response to it. The learning centre will challenge visitors to confront hatred and prejudice by addressing the British history of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides.”
Ultimately the memorial is to be a monument to British values, and a convenient backdrop for politicians wanting to convey their non-racist credentials, supported by the taxpayer and the Jewish community. And if it is to celebrate the British stance in the war, then there is no better place for such a commemorative exhibition than the Imperial War Museum.
There is no need for it to be located in Westminster. What is needed is accessibility to digital learning materials by schools all over the country and to the memories of Jewish survivors already recorded at the British Library and elsewhere. Holocaust education has left many school leavers with only the haziest notion of how many were killed, by whom, and above all why. They are not taught about the meaning of antisemitism, only about hatred and Germans.
By passively going along with these plans and having our concerns silenced, we have allowed today’s politicians to hijack the Holocaust memorial for their own ends.
Generalised and expensive waffle about democracy and “Never Again” will not do it. Just as pulling down statues will not in reality improve black lives, so putting up a memorial will not promote safety and tolerance of Jewish—and other—minorities. Building it without attention to what is needed by way of education could set back the cause of combating antisemitism for decades.
