A cynical manoeuvre
The Labour government's plan to proceed with a controversial memorial strikes a bitter note
The Labour government under Sir Keir Starmer has announced that it intends to build the Holocaust memorial centre planned for London’s Victoria Tower Gardens, a small park next to the Houses of Parliament.
This decision is as bad as it was entirely predictable.
The plan for this Holocaust centre has been mired in bitter controversy for years over its unsuitability on both environmental and ideological grounds. I wrote about it here, here, here and here.
In brief, the issue is this. The park a small, green oasis in Westminster, is entirely unsuitable for a project on the scale of the proposed centre whose design sports 23 tall bronze fins.
It would be an eyesore that would dominate the park, bring a huge amount of traffic, public activity and disruption into the area and destroy a precious local amenity. As Lord Carlile, the government’s former reviewer of terrorism legislation, also told the planning inquiry, its location would turn it into a terrorist target. And that was before the terrorist-supporting, anti-Israel hate marches and epidemic antisemitism erupted to become such a grim feature of British life.
The centre was first proposed by the Conservative government under David Cameron in 2015. It was aggressively promoted by ministers and prominent members of the Jewish community, including major donors to the Conservative party, but opposed by many other distinguished and involved members of the community including Holocaust survivors.
The planning authority, Westminster council, opposed the project. But the matter was taken out of its hands by the government which rode roughshod over all objections. It set in train a planning inquiry, which resulted in a recommendation that the memorial go ahead.
In April 2022, however, the High Court in London quashed the government decision to proceed with the project. The ruling followed the discovery by a member of the public of a legal obstacle to the memorial which the government had ignored. This was the London County Council (Improvements) Act 1900 which imposed an “enduring obligation to retain Victoria Tower Gardens for use as a public garden”.
The judge’s ruling was so emphatic about the obstacle to the proposed memorial imposed by the 1900 law that she refused the government permission to appeal. It responded by declaring that it would legislate to overturn the relevant provision of the 1900 Act.
Now the new Labour government has said it will build the memorial and will similarly legislate to overrule the 1900 Act to ensure that
this legislation is no longer an obstacle preventing the building of a memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens.
As was the case with the previous government, this is an authoritarian and anti-democratic move that will overrule a century-old law in order to ride roughshod over the right of local residents to protect their local environment (very much consistent, however, with this government’s broader intention to build houses on the green belt while bulldozing local protests and environmental protections).
This is what the government said in its background note to the King’s Speech on Wednesday:
We must do everything we can to ensure that the Holocaust is never forgotten and to fight antisemitism and all forms of hatred and prejudice in our society.
Our Holocaust Memorial Bill will support the building of a National Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in the heart of our democracy, next to the Houses of Parliament. It will be a focal point for national remembrance of the Holocaust, dedicated to the six million Jewish men, women and children and all other victims of the Nazis and their collaborators [my emphasis].
The highlighted sentence raises an important question. An even more profound objection to the centre than the acute environmental concerns was that the project would in fact undermine the memory of the Holocaust as the intended genocide of the Jewish people by equating their fate with the horrific but different persecution of others.
In evidence to the planning inquiry, the memorial’s architect said he envisaged the memorial as a place to mark the murder of six million Jews, Roma and “all victims of Nazi persecution”; and also to reflect on “the murder of the millions of Cambodians by the Pol Pot regime, the million Rwandans murdered by the Interahamwe and the thousands of Muslim men and boys murdered in Bosnia”.
In other words, it would relativise, and thus diminish, the extermination of the Jews. The background note, however, states only that the centre will memorialise the victims of the Nazis and their collaborators. Does that mean the nature of the project has changed? Or that officials thought the broader scope of the memorial involved too much detail for such a note? Or was the government intentionally disguising the most troubling aspect of this project?
The background note goes on:
Victoria Tower Gardens will remain open to the public, with only a small area taken for the Holocaust memorial. The design is sensitive to the heritage and existing uses of Victoria Tower Gardens. The memorial and learning centre, much of which will be underground, will take up approximately 7.5 per cent of the park, while making enhancements to the remainder of the gardens that will help all visitors, including better pathways and improved access to existing memorials. The 1900 act only applies to Victoria Tower Gardens, no other park.
Objectors to the project maintain that the amount of useable open space lost in the park for enjoying sitting in the sun and walking dogs would be far larger than 7.5 per cent. They have calculated that more than one third of the usable public areas would be lost.
Whatever the precise details of the physical impact of this centre on the park, the clearly defensive tone of the paragraph quoted above suggests that the government is well aware of the bitterly divisive nature of this long fought-over project and the legal and other issues it raises. So why is it nevertheless so determined to proceed?
The answer, I’m afraid, is a cynical one. Starmer’s declared mission has been to win back the trust of the Jewish community which was shattered by the antisemitism in the party unleashed by its previous hard-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Despite Starmer’s purge of the party’s most egregious antisemites, it still harbours some Jew-haters and is mostly hostile to Israel — as is the whole “progressive” world.
This hostility is already on display in the utterances of the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, who has been articulating boilerplate prejudices about Israel, musing about stopping arms sales to the embattled Jewish state and calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza which would be tantamount to giving victory to Hamas.
The Holocaust memorial project is therefore an all-too predictable sop to the Jewish community to allow it to tell itself that the government isn’t hostile to Jews, “only” to Israel. It will thus drive a lethal wedge in the Jewish community between the perceived interests of Jews and the perceived interests of the Jewish state.
It will build upon the false distinction Starmer himself clearly drew, during his purge of the party, between hatred of Jews (bad), hatred of Israel that crossed certain red lines (bad), and the hatred of Israel that falsely accuses it of “illegal” occupation and human rights offences, demonises Israeli “settlers” and promotes a “Palestinian” cause constructed around the destruction of Israel and erasure of the Jews from their own history in the land — all absolutely fine Labour principles, apparently, and indeed de rigeur among all “progressive” people.
While pondering the disgusting nature of this government manoeuvre, it’s worth revisiting the important observation made by the redoubtable and courageous campaigner against the Victoria Tower Gardens project, Baroness Deech, in an address to the Oxford Jewish community in 2020.
She said that Holocaust memorials were increasingly used to promote
a self-congratulatory and sometimes self-exculpatory image of the country that erects them.
Britain has never faced up to its own role during the Holocaust, when it didn’t merely refuse to take in Jewish refugees apart from a tiny number (like other western countries that have erected Holocaust memorials); worse, it blocked the entry into Palestine of desperate European Jews, in flagrant repudiation of the British Mandate to settle Jews there, thus facilitating their extermination.
This historical amnesia is intimately bound up with Britain’s long-standing animus towards Israel among the British ruling class, its receptivity to the blood libels and demonisation of Israel promulgated by today’s media and cultural elites, and the vicious antisemitism that has been licensed as a result.
As Deech said:
The more the national Holocaust Remembrance Day events are packed out, the more the calls for sanctions on Israel that would result in her destruction, and the more the Holocaust is turned against the Jews.
Those wise words were uttered during a government which was then sympathetic to Israel and contained several ministers deeply committed to the security and support of the Jewish people.
Now a Labour government with a very different perspective can say, hand on heart as it takes the side of those who demonise and delegitimise Israel in order to bring about its destruction: “How can we possibly be hostile to the Jews when we are constructing this enormous Holocaust memorial right next to the Houses of Parliament?”
And there are enough sycophants, ignoramuses and blinkered denialists in the Jewish community leadership to swallow it.