Baroness Deech (CB)

My Lords, I have visited memorials all over the world. The designers of this one said: “When viewed from the northwest corner by the Palace of Westminster, the Memorial is first perceived as a gradual rising hill towards the south end of the VTG. Along the journey south, the path inscribes the rising landscape, and leads along the embankment” past the Buxton memorial “after which the full scale of the Memorial is revealed. The elevated land mass is both hill, and cliff-like landscape, and is held aloft by 23 tall, bronze-clad walls. The overall volume inscribed by the walls offers an interplay between robustness and frailty; cohesiveness and fragmentation; community and individualism”. I have rarely read so much piffle and gibberish attempting to justify a meaningless third-hand design. There are to be 23 bronze fins and the designer, Sir David Adjaye, tried to justify them, with 22 pathways, as a representative signifier of the number of countries from which Jewish victims of the genocide were taken. Again, this symbolic confusion, coupled with the unnecessary and misleading association with the Palace of Westminster, means that there can be no public benefit offered by the design to weigh in the balance that the inspector undertook at the inquiry. Sir Richard Evans, our great historian of Germany, has debunked the figure of 22. He said that it was entirely arbitrary and depended on how you count states, and that many of the victims were refugees from other states. He called the design spectacularly ugly. As the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, said, it has no overt references to religious symbolism or text, relying instead, to quote the architects again, “on the twin primary motifs of the swelling landform and the cresting bronze portals with the descent into the chambers below. The graduated mound, rising out of the tabular lawn to the north, would convey a sense of the growing tide of orchestrated racial aggression and violence, finally breaking with the cataclysmic events of the Holocaust, symbolised by the bronze armature above the descending portals. These defining elements of the Memorial, fashioned from the brown alloy of sculpture, would have a power and grace distinctly of their own. Collectively these elements would make a bold and poetic visual statement of great power and beauty, and one that can be readily understood as such”. How odd, then, that Sir David Adjaye should repeat almost the same design in Niger, in relation to terrorism, and in Barbados, in relation to slavery. In fact, far from the design being done after any research into the park or London, or the UK’s association with the Holocaust, it is a hallmark Adjaye design. In another attempt to justify it, he said that it was deliberately aimed at disrupting the park. His work is instantly recognisable because it always involves stripes. I invite noble Lords to look up his designs on the web. He entered an almost identical design in the competition in Ottawa for a Holocaust memorial there, but that location was entirely different—a concrete island. The involvement of Canada with the Holocaust must have been entirely different, yet he found fit to enter that design into the competition in London. It was unwanted in Ottawa, which chose something else, so it was sitting on the shelf. It is entirely meaningless, with no reference to Jews, the Holocaust or the UK. There are no names and numbers—nothing to evoke the awful events it was planned to stand for. If you saw it, you would say to yourself: “What on earth is that?”. You would not be moved to think of the Holocaust, commemoration, discrimination or persecution, or indeed people. Abstract Holocaust memorials around the world tend to be vandalised much more than figurative designs, because they have no emotional value. The Boston memorial has been vandalised several times. It bears a passing resemblance to the Adjaye one, and was said to have been influential on the jury that chose the latter. Kindertransport memorials and human depictions such as the exceptional sculptures by Kormis in the Gladstone Park Holocaust memorial—I wonder whether any noble Lords have visited it—are less likely to be destroyed. There are many Holocaust memorials in the UK already, to be seen on the Association of Jewish Refugees map of those sites, and not one is as meaningless as this. Abroad there are some beautiful ones, as the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, mentioned. The silver tree in Budapest would be marvellous in Victoria Tower Gardens. The jury that chose it seems not to have done its homework. Did it know about the Ottawa rejection, or that shortly thereafter almost the same design was presented by Adjaye Associates for Niger and Barbados? There can be no escaping the fact that this design is not bespoke and has nothing to do with what it is supposed to commemorate. At least there is a plaque to my grandmother in a Manchester memorial, because there will be nothing here to remind me or anyone else of her. The design has attracted mockery from the outset: a dinosaur; a toast-rack; a whale’s ribcage; a set of false teeth. It will inevitably attract red paint and worse. To use the same design over and over smacks of contempt for what is being remembered. That it has no visible Jewish symbolism is very telling—no figures, no candelabra, no Star of David. That is because the promoters want to downplay the thousands of years of antisemitism that drove the Holocaust by combining its presentation in the learning centre with other genocides—as has been said in Written Answers to Parliamentary Questions—albeit they cannot decide which ones to include. This means in the end only a vague message about not killing people you do not like, and so the Adjaye design says nothing of interest. Like the Berlin concrete blocks memorial, it will not garner respect. The Berlin memorial has people picnicking, dancing and playing on it and riding bicycles between the blocks. The Adjaye design will be perfect for scooter races between the sticks. Do not let the promoters tell you that Adjaye was not the designer. He heads a big team, but it is his name all over the publicity, the evidence, the competition and the maps used to this day. He gave evidence to the public inquiry and the Government trumpeted his choice at the outset. The fact remains that it is Sir David who has withdrawn or been withdrawn from most of his projects, for reasons that I am coming to. Following a year-long investigation by the Financial Times, Sir David Adjaye was accused two years ago of sexual assault and misconduct. He has apologised for entering relationships that blurred the boundaries between his professional and personal life, while not admitting criminal wrongdoing. He said they were consensual. There are graphic descriptions online of assault, his giving money to the women involved and a toxic atmosphere in his office. He has stepped back from projects in Liverpool, Sharjah, the Serpentine, Harlem, Oregon and elsewhere. Sexual violence against Jewish women was widespread and well documented in the Holocaust. Rape was a feature of the pogroms of eastern Europe a century ago and it featured in the massacres of 7 October. I have no words to express the horror and disgust that I and others will experience if this Government are so uncaring as to allow to go forward a project whose lead designer is associated with sexual assault. This cannot be allowed to stand. There could quite quickly be a commission for a new figurative memorial that means something, as quickly as the project to honour the late Queen is going ahead. That would satisfy the need to reflect on the events of the war and would fit in with VTG and its other sculptures. I cannot urge noble Lords too strongly to accept this amendment and not continue with a design that is an affront to the victims and their relatives. If that design remains, we will get the message that the Government do not care about the feelings of those who will see it and are stubbornly determined to go ahead with a design by someone whom, I fear, will be associated in future only with his sexually inappropriate misbehaviour.