Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)

My Lords, I added my name to this amendment because it seems a brave attempt to bridge a gap between two very entrenched positions. Having sat through most, if not all, of the Committee and through today at Report, I am reminded of the football manager saying, “I have a sense of déjà vu all over again”. One important thing we can do is try to focus on what has united us as opposed to what has divided us. I think everybody who took part in the Committee was supportive of the key objectives of the Holocaust Commission. It is worthwhile quoting briefly what the committee said: “The National Memorial should … be a place where people can pay their respects, contemplate, think and offer prayers … provide factual information about what happened”, and “convey the enormity of the Holocaust and its impact”. As the noble Lord, Lord Moore, reminded us earlier, those are two very different activities. The first is a personal thing: I go to pray and I go to pay my respects. The second may be personal but it is more likely to be collective: I am learning something. The emphases of the two parts of what is required by this Bill are quite different. Therefore, when people say that they need to be linked together, I am not sure I buy that, for the reasons I have just explained. My noble friend Lord Evans suggested it is going to be ticket-only admission. Is it going to be ticket-only admission for me to pray? That puts quite a different emphasis on the nature of the relationship between the public, Jewish or non-Jewish, and the memorial we are creating. Part of our difficulty has been that, during Committee, although valuable points were made, it was clearly felt by both Front Benches that this was a Bill that was close to perfect and therefore amendments were unlikely to be tabled to improve it but, rather, in many cases, to impede its progress. The Minister dealt with all these amendments with his customary humour, tolerance and patience. I was grateful, and I am sure the Committee was grateful to him too. He is, I know, a proud Lancastrian from Burnley, the home of the cricketer Jimmy Anderson. I hope he will forgive me if I say that, on this occasion, at the Dispatch Box his performance reminded me of another cricketer—the proud Yorkshireman Geoffrey Boycott, whose renowned shot was the forward defensive prod, giving nothing away. The consequence of that is that we have returned to a lot of the stuff that we could have cleared out in Committee, if there had been any evidence of a readiness to reflect and consider matters in a more constructive way.