Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)

My Lords, I warmly endorse the amendment and the speeches by the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, and the right reverend Prelate. I briefly invite your Lordships to make a comparison in order to understand how we might look at this issue. It is a comparison we can make with our own eyes when we travel in this part of London every day, because we can walk past the Cenotaph. Even before the First World War came to a conclusion, people thought very hard about how to remember it and how to pay the right tribute and get the right amount of information to preserve it with memorials and so on. The Imperial War Museum was conceived before the war ended in 1917 and the Cenotaph was erected as early as 1922, so people moved faster in those days when they thought about these matters, but they thought very hard. One of the things that people such as Rudyard Kipling, Fabian Ware and of course Lutyens were debating was: what are we trying to say? They tried to work it out very carefully before they said it, and I think we have been doing the process backwards. In the Cenotaph you have a beautiful simplicity that is very carefully thought about. It is a monument to the dead and all it says is, “The Glorious Dead”. It does not even say, “Our Glorious Dead”, or “The Dead of the British Empire”. It says, “The Glorious Dead”, and that is it. Everybody who has walked past it ever since has thought about that. Indeed, in the days when men wore hats, they always took off their hats to it as they passed. At the same time, quite separately but with similar motives, people thought about how to commemorate it in the sense of learning and historical thought and evidence, and there you have the Imperial War Museum. There is no reason to believe that the commemorative memorial idea should physically go with the learning idea. In this case, for all sorts of reasons adumbrated, that is physically difficult as well. I ask us to learn from that very beautiful example and to apply it to a situation and a subject that is equally important and equally tragic.