Another defeat for London Holocaust Memorial plan – is it time to scrap the scheme?
Posted by admin978 on July 23, 2022 · Leave a Comment
Vastly expensive plans for a huge Holocaust memorial in London, next to the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, have suffered another defeat after the Court of Appeal refused to hear the case.
In April this year the High Court blocked the plans, and this week an appeal by the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation fell at the first hurdle.
Former prime minister David Cameron launched the plan in 2014 by appointing a Holocaust Commission which reported the following year, recommending a prominent new memorial with attached “learning centre”. The plan soon acquired cross-party support and in July 2016 Victoria Tower Gardens – a park adjacent to Parliament – was chosen as the site.
Architects David Adjaye and Ron Arad were chosen for the project. Their initial budget of £50 million has since risen to a current estimate of £102.9 million.
In 2019 Westminster City Council’s planning authority rejected the proposal. The two leading politicians who co-chaired the project – Conservative Lord Pickles and Labour’s Ed Balls – wrote to the council complaining that planning officers were “giving excessive weight to the number of objections lodged on the planning portal”.
These objections lodged with the council included a detailed report by H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton (who now also writes the Real History Blog). His report to Westminster City Council was based on detailed research into the planning history of the original London Holocaust memorial in the 1980s – click here to read.
The late Richard Edmonds recorded a film with Lady Michèle Renouf on the site of the proposed memorial. Click here to view this film.
Government ministers sought to override Westminster Council by appointing a Whitehall inspector who recommended acceptance of the plan. Housing minister Chris Pincher officially approved the scheme in July 2021. (Pincher has since been disgraced after a series of alcohol-fuelled sexual assaults on young men; his downfall led to the recent resignation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.)
In April this year Mrs Justice Thornton in the High Court ruled that Pincher had acted unlawfully, because Victoria Tower Gardens is protected by a statute dating back to 1900 which specifically prevents it being used as anything other than a garden open to the public.
This week the Court of Appeal ruled that there was no realistic prospect of the High Court judgment being overturned, so it would not hear the case. “There is no real prospect of successfully arguing that the judge’s construction of the 1900 Act was wrong… On the contrary, it was plainly correct.”
The Appeal Court judges rebuked the Holocaust Memorial Foundation for arguing that objectors to the proposal should not have been allowed to raise one of their successful legal points: “It is extremely unattractive for the losing party to argue that his opponent should not have been allowed to introduce a legal argument that turned out to be correct.”
In a typically shameless and arrogant gesture, government minister Paul Scully and Holocaust Educational Trust chief executive Karen Pollock insisted this week that they still support the project, despite it now having been rejected three times – by city council planners, the High Court, and the Court of Appeal.
H&D understands that the only realistic possibility of forcing through the project now would be for the government to introduce legislation (which would have to be passed by both Houses of Parliament) repealing the 1900 law and allowing Victoria Tower Gardens to be used for something other than a park.
If such a law is proposed, we shall use this as an opportunity for a long-overdue debate on the whole principle of whether London should be forced to have a vastly expensive Holocaust memorial. Such a debate must ask the central questions:
What was the ‘Holocaust’?
What did British intelligence and British ministers know (or think they knew) about the ‘Holocaust’ during the 1940s, and what was the factual basis for their knowledge?
What was the relationship between international Jewish organisations and the British war effort, including propaganda and subversive warfare organisations?
If the British taxpayer is expected to pay more than £100 million, and sacrifice a large chunk of the nation’s capital city, to memorialise the ‘Holocaust’, then we have a right to expect answers to these questions.
