Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. I congratulate and thank the new Members of your Lordships’ House on their maiden speeches, all of which were deeply moving.

It somehow seems fitting that I should make my first speech since recent surgery to repair an undiagnosed femur fracture—on which I have been unwittingly, if somewhat painfully, hobbling for months—by speaking in this debate. It was, after all, my childhood Jewish refugee surgeon, Hanuš Weisl, who put me back together again more times than I care to remember. He lost almost all his family in the Holocaust. I think of him today and his family members, whom the wonderful Wiener Holocaust Library has established were murdered in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. May they rest in peace and may their memory be a blessing.

Inevitably, all of us, as we have heard in this debate, turn our thoughts to our precious Holocaust survivors and to the world’s promise to them immediately after the war: “Never again”. How do we best honour them, our Holocaust survivors? I ask myself what “Never again” means. Does it, for example, simply mean no more concentration camps, crematoria or gas chambers—the physical structures which the Soviet troops stumbled upon in disbelief 80 years ago? Does it mean no more Nuremberg laws, to which Matthew Pennycook, in his powerful Statement of 23 January in the other place, implicitly referred in terms of the Nazi legislation discriminating against Jews and depriving them of rights and property? Mercifully, both are very unlikely in today’s world.

So I ask myself another question: how do we counter the challenge that remains? How do we perform the task of eradicating what the Minister described in his poignant opening remarks as man’s darkest impulses? Does that insidious and poisonous prejudice—which informed, by osmosis and within a remarkably short period of time, the culture underpinning the abomination that was the Holocaust—still exist?

We have already heard about the IHRA’s current theme, “In Plain Sight”. That phrase reminded me of something that the remarkable Holocaust survivor, Manfred Goldberg, whom the Minister mentioned, said to me about the promise “Never again”. Manfred told me that he had genuinely taken it for granted that the promise would be kept; he took it at face value at the time and for all time. I know that he is horrified that the hatred is back and in plain sight.

That brought home to me that it is not enough for me to say, “We will always remember you and the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust”. In an age of pernicious poison spread via social media, we need to acknowledge the racism still in plain sight on the streets of our capital most weekends. I refer of course to the demonstrations in central London, the first of which—the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign—unbelievably started organising while the 7 October pogrom was under way.

As well as being the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, 2025 is the 60th anniversary of Labour’s Race Relations Act receiving Royal Assent. As noble Lords will know, the Act made the promotion of hatred on the grounds of race, colour and ethnic or national origins an offence. The vile vitriol being visited on our Jewish communities clearly runs counter to the Act. This is racism, pure and simple, and it is happening in plain sight. I ask the Minister to say in her closing remarks whether she agrees that a fitting way both to mark the Act’s anniversary and to assure the survivors that “Never again” means exactly that would be for His Majesty’s Government to be even more clear that what is happening on our streets is racism and it will not be tolerated.

I take one common, supposedly innocent chant as an example. Now, I know what is meant by “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—survivors certainly do. It means the destruction of Israel. It means the mass murder of Jews for being Jews, as we saw Hamas perpetrate on 7 October. It means a one-state, not a two-state, solution.

It is understandable that, in our desire to see peace in the Middle East, some want to believe that we are dealing with a peace-loving entity in Hamas. Yet if there is one organisation that has shown time and again that it is absolutely against peace and that it does not want a two-state solution, it is Hamas; rather, it wants to kill Jews and destroy the State of Israel. I refer noble Lords to Hamas’s statements of 24 October 2023, 30 January, 14 June and 24 October 2024. Its racist, genocidal hatred on grounds of race is in plain sight.

In conclusion, I want to take up the challenge set by my noble friend Lady Eaton in her excellent speech. I welcome the assurance given by the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, on Monday that Hamas can play no part in the future of Gaza’s governance. But can the Minister assure the House that its supporters here in the UK will not be allowed to reduce her and our sincere, renewed pledge of “Never again” to a meaningless mantra recited to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day? Surely we can all agree that that is the least our survivors and the millions of victims of the Holocaust deserve.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 13th September 2023 Lords Chamber

That is why this amendment is so important. Local councils understand the needs of their residents; we live the same lives as them, rather than being chauffeured around like the mayor—and, unlike the mayor, we believe in democracy. I support the amendment.

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for tabling Amendment 282N and the consequential amendments, and His Majesty’s Government for supporting them. Unlike my noble friend, I do want to talk about ULEZ, although I totally understand and appreciate the points that he made about the importance of local democracy.

Noble Lords will know how important the blue badge scheme is to many disabled people and their families—and indeed their personal assistants, where applicable. I declare an interest as someone who relies on my blue badge for parking in a whole range of places, including town centres.

What noble Lords may not know is how relevant—indeed, how crucial—these amendments are to protecting blue badge holders from disability discrimination. In fact, I only became aware of this thanks to the indefatigable efforts of the formidable disability rights campaigner, Kush Kanodia.

As I understand it, incredibly, blue badge holders who are not in receipt of certain benefits are not exempt from ULEZ charges—unlike in Glasgow, for example. So this is effectively a discriminatory penalty for disability—or, in the case of non-disabled family members or personal assistants who may use a blue badge to assist with transport, a fine for providing support to a disabled person. This is surely not right. Amendment 282N and the consequential amendments would allow this manifest wrong to be put right through this opting-out provision. I wholeheartedly support it.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, here we are on day seven of Report, and up pops yet another amendment on a completely new topic. It is so out of scope that, to debate it, the Long Title of the Bill has also to be amended.

The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, has chosen to discuss, via the theme of ULEZ, the London devolution deal. How much better if he had done so during the very long section of debate on the Bill devoted to devolution. The amendments that he has proposed have only a tenuous link with the prime purpose of this Bill: levelling up. If he wanted to truly level up in the areas of the country identified in the Government’s own White Paper, the amendments would focus on transport issues elsewhere in the country.

Those of us who live in the north, especially in west Yorkshire, can only dream of the quality of public transport available in London. For instance, the government commitment, repeated many times, simply to electrify the trans-Pennine route, has been dropped. The new trans-Pennine route, nationalised because of its previous failure, has the highest number of train cancellations of all train companies. Added to this appalling level of service comes the decision that the 13 new trainsets for the route are to be taken out of service for want of trained drivers. In addition to this very large dent in already creaking connectivity in the north is the increasingly poor service provided by bus companies, which results in growing numbers having to rely on private transport, thus increasing the already poor air quality in many northern urban areas.

How much more beneficial to promoting levelling up—the purpose of this Bill—if the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, had used his talent to direct government attention to levelling up connectivity, which is absolutely essential if areas defined in the levelling up White Paper are to enjoy growing investment and prosperity.

International Women’s Day

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Friday 10th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this important debate. As someone who owes so much to my refugee surgeon, who was on the last train out of Prague before the Nazis closed the borders, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Lampard on her outstanding maiden speech.

I declare my interest as the unpaid chair of the IoD’s commission, The Future of Business: Harnessing Diverse Talent for Success. This debate is a chance to thank and pay tribute to the women leaders who serve on the commission and from whom I have learned so much: I Stephanie Boyce, the first woman of colour to be president of the Law Society; Virginia Clegg, senior partner at DAC Beachcroft; Dr Zara Nanu, CEO of Gapsquare; Theresa Shearer, CEO of ENABLE; and my noble friend Lady Morrissey.

This is my first opportunity to pay loving tribute to a powerful and passionate educator of so many people: the Irish playwright, and my aunt, Josephine Egan, who was killed in a car crash on Christmas Eve. I will always love, thank and miss her. She was a very strong woman, like her sisters, one of whom, of course, is my mother, who raised me as a single mum for much of my childhood, while holding down a demanding job. Her example makes it impossible for me to see women as anything other than equal.

This visibility is so important both for celebrating progress and in addressing threats. For, without doubt, the danger of almost unimaginable regression is sadly very real. My noble friends Lady Jenkin and Lady Fall referred to Afghanistan, which provides perhaps the most poignant example. I suggest that the institutionalised misogyny of the mullahs in Tehran comes a very close second. How well the women protesters in Iran have earned the title “women of courage”. I ask my noble friend to relay to her ministerial colleagues at the FCDO the urgency of proscribing the IRGC and thus striking a body-blow to this women-hating terrorist regime. Its collapse cannot come too soon.

Away from such brutality and closer to home, I hesitate to use the term “women of courage” in a first-world context, but I feel it is none the less appropriate when one considers the totally unwarranted vitriol directed against another group of women, who bravely educate us all by their example. I refer to those who, while respecting trans people, nevertheless push back against the polarising poison of trans fanaticism, which tragically toxifies the vital debate on the essence of what it is to be human, especially in relation to our immutable biology. I join my noble friend Lady Seccombe in paying grateful tribute to, among others, JK Rowling, Kathleen Stock, Maya Forstater and of course my noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington, as well as Joanna Cherry KC and Rosie Duffield, both of the other place. I pay tribute to their courage, tenacity and integrity in standing up for equality. Recent developments in Scotland have sadly more than vindicated their concerns.

In conclusion, my noble friend Lady Jenkin mentioned the survey published yesterday by Ipsos and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London. This showed that 55% of men say that society has gone so far in promoting women’s rights that it is discriminating against men. After millennia of discrimination against women, the fact that men are at last beginning to know what it feels like has to be a promising sign. What a small price to pay for progress.

International Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Pickles for securing this debate. It gives us an opportunity to perform a disturbing but essential duty—the duty to bear witness, as the noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum, said, to the unparalleled abomination that engulfed and destroyed the lives of millions of what my noble friend Lord Pickles reminded us were ordinary people who happened to be Jewish, and which permanently scarred humanity with the deepest wound it has ever inflicted on itself.

In preparation for today’s debate, I read the autobiography of the late and much-revered Rabbi Hugo Gryn. About half of the book recounts an idyllic childhood spent at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains in what was then Czechoslovakia. Its stark contrast with what follows reduced me to tears. The rest of the book is a deeply distressing, dehumanising horror story. As we know, that was precisely the intention of the racist, genocidal Nazi regime: to dehumanise and annihilate a group that it classified as “Untermensch”. Yet as Hugo Gryn himself concedes, even until 1943, he and his family, living in the comparative safety of what was then Hungary, were unsuspecting. Now, 80 years later and with the horrors of Pol Pot, Srebrenica, and Xinjiang among others to remind us of how far and how fast we can fall as a species, we have no such excuse.

I have heard it said that, “It is terribly sad what happened to the Jews, but it was a long time ago.” Was it, and can we ever truly afford to consign a crime of such unconscionable depravity and magnitude to the distant past? Can we, when today in Europe Putin is using missiles designed to sink large warships instead to demolish apartment blocks full of innocent Ukrainian citizens? Can we, when humanity’s propensity for unspeakable, unbelievable barbarity is so much part of the present? It is rivalled only by our capacity to unlearn the lessons of history.

Hugo Gryn speaks of the duty of Holocaust survivors

“to impress our fellow men with our terrible knowledge, lest we or our children or our children’s children be doomed to suffer the agonies of its recurrence.”

We have a duty too. We have a choice. We can choose to ignore irrefutable evidence of genocide in Xinjiang, or we can promise today that what Hugo Gryn describes as

“the deafening silence of decent bystanders”,

whose passivity allowed the Holocaust to happen, will never apply to us.

Fire Safety Bill

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 29th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I am grateful for these probing amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. I understand her point: they are clearly important and they help our further consideration of the Bill. In particular, her identification of the need for trained assessors seems extremely important; I think that we will deal with that a little later this afternoon.

Amendment 2 relates to low-rise domestic buildings—that is, those of four storeys or fewer. I am not clear why, because they are lower than a high-risk block, they should be deemed a lower risk. Surely we are trying to stop fires breaking out; that is not related directly to the height of a building. Added to that is the fact that, sometimes, building height is quoted at different levels for different purposes. Sometimes it is done on the basis of height; sometimes it is done on the basis of the number of floors. I would appreciate some greater standardisation so that we do not face discussions on 18 metres or 11 metres, the number of floors and so on.

The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, said—this is important—that the Government must map a way forward. I hope that the Minister will bring some clarity on this in his response. As the noble Baroness said, it is terribly important not to get the detail wrong. In our consideration of this amendment—as we know, it is a probing amendment—it would be helpful to consider it as part and parcel of our intention to get the detail much better than it has been in the past.

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise for not being in the Chamber when my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe opened her remarks. I rise to speak in support of Amendment 2 but I will focus my remarks on Amendments 20 and 21 in particular, which deal with the need for impact assessments.

I thank my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for setting out so clearly the rationale behind her amendments. I begin by explaining why this issue is so important to me personally—in short, there but for the grace of God go I. Contrary to the damaging impression given by the Lords Commission’s inept decision to cut the attendance allowance and reduce significantly the eligibility to claim it—just at the time when the Chancellor introduced the furlough scheme to reduce stress—many noble Lords are not millionaires and have given up well-paid jobs to serve their country in your Lordships’ House. I have never earned a huge amount of money, so as a former leaseholder in the shared ownership part of a new-build development, I do not know how I could possibly have coped with the uncertainty, stress and immense costs currently faced by leaseholders.