Lord Blencathra (Con)

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Saint Albans has had to go to another meeting and asked me, with noble Lords’ permission, to speak to his Amendment 23. It is about an endowment fund to help counter anti-Semitism. An Ofcom report of July 2022 showed that for teenagers, Instagram gave them 29% of the news, TikTok 28% and YouTube 28%. These are the main sources of news with ITV and the BBC way down in fourth and fifth places. The Ofcom report also states: “Users of TikTok for news claim to get more of their news on the platform from ‘other people they follow’ (44%) than ‘news organisations’ (24%).” The report continues: “Teenagers today are increasingly unlikely to pick up a newspaper or tune into TV News, instead preferring to keep up-to-date by scrolling through their social feeds”. If those social media outlets were accurate, we would have little concern, but also in July 2023 we had a United Nations report History Under Attack. It was a co-operation with an Oxford organisation and found that up to half of Holocaust-related content on Telegram denied or distorted the facts. It said that distortion and Holocaust denial was present on all social media but that moderation and education can significantly reduce this. It went on to say that UNESCO and the United Nations sought to measure the extent of this phenomenon on social networks and commissioned researchers to identify and analyse about 4,000 posts related to the Holocaust on the five major platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok and Twitter. These were the findings: on Telegram, there was 50% distortion and denial of the Holocaust in English language messages; on Twitter, which is now X, there was 19% distortion; on TikTok, 17%; on Facebook, 8%; and on Instagram, 3%. Many of those comments were anti-Semitic as well. Another key finding of the United Nations report is that the researchers identified that perpetrators have learned to evade content moderation through the use of humorous and parodic memes as a strategy intended to normalise anti-Semitic ideas and make them appear mainstream. I had no idea what anti-Semitic memes were, or any memes, but I found hundreds on the internet, some suggesting that the Jews had attacked USS “Liberty” in 1967, others that the Jews had brought down the Twin Towers in New York. Some said that if America was to save itself then it had to declare war on Israel. Thousands of these memes are absolutely scurrilous, despicable lies and hate-filled, but millions of our young people are lapping them up. Up to even three years ago, I thought that education on the Holocaust of 80 years ago was all that we needed to do, but now we see hundreds of thousands of people on our streets calling for a new Holocaust, the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jews. Indeed, in 2019 the BBC published a poll of more than 2,000 people that was carried out by Opinion Matters for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. It found, and this is quite frightening, that 5% of UK adults—that is, out of 45 million—do not believe that the Holocaust took place, and one in 12 believes that its scale has been exaggerated. Some 45% of those polled said they did not know how many people were killed in the Holocaust, while 19% believed that fewer than 2 million Jews were murdered and 5% believed that there was no Holocaust at all; that is 2.2 million people. That is frightening—all those British people denying the Holocaust or completely ignorant about it. It is therefore essential that we create an endowment fund to undertake 24/7 Holocaust education and rebuttal of all the new anti-Semitic attacks. That is why we need a proper campus, as recommended in the Holocaust Commission report, staffed by experts who can work online 24/7 countermanding lies about the Holocaust and the new Holocaust demand to push the Jews out of Israel, their homeland, from the river to the sea. Anti-Semitism is on the rise worldwide, and it seems to be even worse in the UK, so a monument to the unique Holocaust of 80 years ago is essential. Equally essential is annual funding to tackle the new lies about Jews and the calls for their extermination. I turn to my Amendments 29 and 30, and I believe my noble friend Lord Hodgson will speak to Amendment 31 in my place. I also support Amendments 2, 3, 4 and 6 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone. As I said in my speech on Amendment 1, I concluded that Conservative politicians opted for the completely unsuitable Victoria Tower Gardens and ignored the recommendations of the Holocaust Commission because they thought the gardens would be an easier bet. However, the site fails to deliver a central theme of the commission—indeed, its key recommendation 2. Recommendation 1 concluded with the words: “But it is also clear that a memorial on its own is not enough and that there must be somewhere close at hand where people can go to learn” about the Holocaust. This is what the commission said about the ideal site for the memorial and learning centre. In its “Delivery and Next Steps” section, it said, and it is worth while quoting it: “The Commission has identified three possible locations that should be considered as part of a consultation taken forwards by the permanent independent body … The Holocaust Exhibition at IWM London is very highly regarded, as was demonstrated throughout the evidence received. There is therefore an obvious advantage in locating the Learning Centre alongside IWM London in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park near Lambeth. The site is within easy reach of Westminster and accessible via several routes by public transport. It offers existing high footfall with approximately 1.5 million visits to IWM in 2014. IWM has proposed the building of a new wing to house a memorial and a learning centre and to link to newly expanded and upgraded Holocaust galleries in the main building. This would also benefit from being able to use the existing visitor facilities and essential infrastructure of the IWM building”.