Meeting of the Parliament 28 January 2020
Last night, I was proud to sponsor Parliament’s Holocaust memorial day event with my colleague, Iain Gray. I was struck by the sense of people coming together not just as an act of observation, but in participation and shared responsibility. We were privileged to be joined by Janine Webber, who is a Holocaust survivor and whom other members have referenced. She told her remarkable story of how she survived through the resilience of family members, twists of fate, rare acts of defiance by others and, above all—although she would not say it herself—her own personal strength.
I was struck by her age as she lived through those experiences. Born in 1933, she was seven when her father was shot by the Nazis within her earshot. She told us of her experience of witnessing her mother’s death from typhoid in a damp rat-infested basement in the ghetto when she was nine. At 10, her brother was shot in front of her by a member of the SS. She showed us photos of her and her brother that were taken before the war. Looking at those two children, who were the same age as my daughters are, I listened to the 87-year-old woman but thought of that seven-year-old girl. As a father, what I felt was anguish and horror that a child so young should have had to experience those things.
I want to speak about the need for us all to carry forward the memory of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. In the 75th year on from the liberation of that most infamous of Nazi death camps, many members have—rightly—commented on the significance of those years, as direct witness to the events is slowly lost. It is, therefore, incumbent on each of us to consider what the Holocaust means to us, to share the experience and not just the facts, and to learn from and act on those lessons.
An important recent influence on my thinking was a book that I read, “East West Street”, which is one man’s exploration of his family’s experience of the Holocaust. The main reason why the book made an impression on me was the story that it told of everyday people, and of how Nazi persecution and extermination of Jewish people unfolded. It tells of the lives of shopkeepers, lawyers and farmhands, of aunties and grandparents, daughters and sons. It tells of lives like anybody’s—lives like ours.
The Holocaust did not happen to them in a single action or event. There were a number of small, sometimes subtle, steps. There were municipal edicts, regulatory changes, Government requirements and mandated actions. Those were enabled not by initial overriding hatred, but by casual prejudice, careless othering and the self-interested inaction of people who chose to look the other way. That is how it starts and how it takes hold, and that is why we must be so wary of the insidious rise of antisemitism that we are currently experiencing.
I feel that I must, as a Labour Party member and elected representative, say that that is a particularly important point for me to state. The Labour Party is supposed to be the party of equality, of social justice and of human rights. However, in recent months and years, we have failed. In particular, we have failed the Jewish people. Following recent events, I made a personal point of reaching out to talk with, and to listen to, the Jewish community in Edinburgh. I felt that I needed to take direct personal steps, and have been struck by the pain, the hurt, and the fear that our actions, and inactions, have caused. They include our failure to deal with complaints, our re-admission of members who have been guilty of antisemitism and our reluctance to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.
In my 25 years of being a Labour Party member, the party has done things that I have disagreed with, and it has done things that have made me angry. However, in all those years, those events and conversations were the first times when I have ever felt ashamed to be a Labour Party member.
I am in no doubt that the challenges are not unique to the Labour Party—they are challenges that we all face. However, I want the Labour Party to hold itself to a higher standard. I want it to be the party of justice and of human rights. Labour must put an end to this, and it must never let these issues arise again. As the party that is responsible for enshrining so many of our rights and for pursuing equality, we have a responsibility to put this right. I know that we will.
The events have also convinced me that we must take personal responsibility to carry on the lessons of the Holocaust and to tackle antisemitism and prejudice. We cannot allow the actions of the Nazis to be something that happened to other people. They are things that happened to people—people like me, people like you, people like all of us. They were crimes against humanity—crimes against us all.
We must strive not only to memorise the facts of the Holocaust, but to share and pass on the feelings and human experience of those who survived, and of those who fell victim. To truly learn the lessons, it is not enough simply to say the right things; we must also take the right actions. We must call out intolerant behaviours, we must challenge casual prejudice and we must take action against the powerful when they seek to oppress the minority.
Those are my personal lessons from what was experienced those 75 years ago.
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