Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)

My Lords, I have been living at Tufton Court since 1982; it is just around the corner from this park. I was not intending to speak to this amendment until I got rather provoked by a number of my noble friends. My noble friend Lord Finkelstein said, “If it doesn’t go here, where else does it go?” I think my noble friend Lord Sterling has answered that point. There is a very satisfactory Holocaust memorial at the Imperial War Museum, which is not a place where nobody ever goes. It is a place where lots of people go, and it is very regularly visited. Could there be a better location for it than that? My noble friend Lord Pickles said that this is going to improve the park. It is one of the smallest parks in London. I do not claim to go to it very often, but it is a very, very small park and, with all due respect to the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, I am not sure it has been much improved by the Parliament Education Centre, which is a disgracefully low-budget architectural piece of building. I am very glad that it is going to be rebuilt —perhaps it will be rebuilt better than it is now—but it occupies quite a lot of this very small park, and the idea that we should shove yet another building into the park seems unbelievable. I cannot quite understand where we are going on this. I do not understand why the Government have volunteered taxpayers’ money, when there is so little of it, to finance this. The Jewish community in Britain has an awful lot of money. It has a lot of education charities that would contribute towards this. I do not understand why they should not pay for their own memorial. Unlike my noble friend, I have plenty of Jewish blood, and I am a member of the Conservative Friends of Israel.