Speech Given to the Holocaust Educational Trust

This speech was originally given to the Holocaust Educational Trust.

It’s a true honour to be with you today. This is such an important organization, so well led by Karen, so dynamic in its character, so universal in the way it applies its values, and above all so extraordinary in the Holocaust survivors who continue to grace its events. But I confess it is also wrenching to be so far from each other as a result of COVID, and for me to be so far from what I still consider to be home.

We are meeting on a day historians will remember, because just an hour or two ago Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States. What I want to talk about today is how this year’s transition of power in America should give pause to democracy’s friends just as it has provided succor to her enemies.

The essence of a transition should be accountability, the accountability of those in power for their decisions and performance. Yet the defining impulse of the Trump Presidency has been impunity, the exercise of power without responsibility, precisely the opposite of accountability. And the events of recent weeks make America more notable for its warning than its inspiration.

 President Trump is leaving the Presidency with the country’s Capitol besmirched by a hate mob he incited, and large sections of his party stained by association with a riot which included people wearing T-shirts reading “6MWE” – which, and I hardly dare repeat it in front of this audience, stands for “six million wasn’t enough”.

 My request is that today we do not focus on President Trump and what Fintan O’Toole has called “that great prairie of paranoia that stretches between what happened and what really happened”. Instead we should reflect on two facts.

 First, the most powerful country in the democratic world is undergoing an unprecedented attack on its democratic system by significant sections of one of its two political parties.

 Second, that America is not alone in suffering sustained attack on its democratic institutions, laws and norms.

 The harsh truth is brutal: the rule of law is in retreat in many parts of the world. I call this the Age of Impunity. It should be a warning to us in the UK, as we think about life after Brexit.

 Around the world, in domestic as well as foreign policy, might is increasingly willing to assert that it is right. Impunity is on the march, and our alarm bells should be ringing.

 The Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg studies democratic health in 182 countries. They pronounce that when you measure the fairness of elections, and freedom of association and expression, we are living through a “third wave of autocratisation”.

 The 1930s. The 1970s. And today.

 This new wave of “unfreedom” is a contrast to previous waves. There is no sudden putsch. It is a creeping, gradual setback, often within legal frameworks, of the institutional requirements of electoral democracy.

The Gothenburg study is not alone.

• The NGO Freedom House has documented 14 successive years of decline in political freedom around the world: elections less free, independence of the judiciary reduced, freedom of the press reduced.
• The Economist Intelligence Unit has its own Democracy Index. In 2019 it showed the worst average global score since 2006.
• I know from my work with the International Rescue Committee, that civilians are being killed in war in ever greater numbers, contrary to the laws of war. That’s impunity. I know too that refugees and asylum-seekers striving for safety are being denied their rights in more places more of the time. That’s impunity too.
• And it is worth pointing out the association of the waves of autocratisation with antisemitism. Antisemitism is not always the first canary in the mine, but when Jews are not the first group called unwelcome or foreign or dangerous, that targeting is not usually far behind. It is a source of enduring pain and shame that the political party to which I belong should have become a home, temporarily I trust, for people who spout antisemitic bile.

 Here is my point: There is a global political fight going on between accountability and impunity. I think this fight defines the decade ahead. And I believe it is not alarmist to sound the alarm, because impunity is on the rise.

In making that case, I want to take the name of a lost friend. The death in November last year of Jonathan Sacks was a heavy blow. We need him today. But his books and other writings leave an extraordinary trove of insight. In his last book, Morality, he wrote: “Liberal democracy is at risk in Britain, Europe and the US…to its adversaries the West looks jaded, exhausted, divided and weak.”

So we have been warned.

 America’s recent troubles did not start with an assault on the Capitol. They started with broken norms and laws, then became a series of “alternative facts”, and were finally pickled into a Big Lie and the call for violence.

 Seismic events start with small moves. Or in a telling phrase I saw recently: “the broken norms you walk past are the new norms you accept”.

 My dad always told me that anyone who conjured up the 1930s had lost the argument. But you don’t need to argue that we are facing a re-run of the 1930s to say that liberal democracy looks weaker today than for two or three generations.

 President Putin of Russia is gleeful: he told the Financial Times in 2018 that the “liberal idea” was obsolete. Holocaust Memorial Day is a good moment to vow to prove him wrong.

 The liberal idea is actually simple. It should unite those of all political persuasions – left and right - and none. It is the idea that every power – political, economic, social; individual, collective, corporate - needs to be held in check by institutions, laws and norms explicitly designed to counter the tendency for power to corrupt and absolute power to corrupt absolutely, to counter the tendency to impunity.

 In 1952, JK Galbraith called these checks and balances “countervailing power”, and we need more of them today. 

• The countervailing power of national and local institutions that are insulated from political patronage, not manipulated by it, and bound by rules of political neutrality. That includes the BBC, which is in the unhappy position of holding government to account while depending on it for its governance and funding arrangements.
• The countervailing power of the rule of law, and its independent implementation, that holds governments in check. Judges who uphold the law are the greatest friends of “the people”, not their enemy.
• The countervailing power of norms that are best codified in constitutional law, so they are not diluted.
• The countervailing power, too, of national and international regulation of the anti-social parts of social media. Francis Fukuyama is surely right to argue: “Internet platforms cause political harms that are far more alarming than any economic damage they create. Their real danger is not that they distort markets; it is that they threaten democracy.”
• There is need for countervailing power in the economy too, because economic impunity can feed political impunity. To quote Martin Wolf, countervailing power is needed to prevent corporations from writing the rules of the game rather than just playing by them; if praying to Milton Friedman’s God of shareholder value means acceding in the promotion of junk science on climate and the environment, or allowing lobbying for tax systems that let companies park vast proportions of their profits in tax havens, or turning a blind eye as they seek to neuter effective competition policy, then we should stop praying to that God.

 Countervailing Power is what makes liberal democracy different from other systems. It does not just allow for challenge to authority. It encourages it. Because it believes that there can be no monopoly of wisdom, and there should be no oligopoly of power.

There is a brilliant recent book called The Narrow Corridor, which shatters any illusion that liberal democracy is the natural order of things. Holding state and society in balance is a tightrope walk. That leads us back to the work of the Holocaust Education Trust.

Holocaust Memorial Day, which is marked next week, always makes me think about the privileges of my generation, born in safety twenty years after the Holocaust. I call us the transitional generation, old enough to have known Holocaust survivors, to know what it means when people refer to numbers on their arms, young enough to outlive them.

 We are the lucky ones. And with that fortune comes responsibility. Above all the responsibility to testify to the stories we were told, and to ensure that the lessons of that terrible period are learned for our world.

 These lessons are not just for the protection of Jews. When the post-World War 2 generation said, “Never Again”, they did not just mean Never Again must there be genocide attempted against Jews. They said Never Again should genocide be attempted against any group.

 In 2017 France passed a law that is known as the “duty of vigilance”, about the exploitation of environmental resources. But a duty of vigilance should not be confined to environmental damage.

It means being vigilant about antisemitism. It also means standing and acting in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. It means speaking out against horrors in immigration and asylum policy. It means denouncing demonization of the Muslim population. It means calling out clearly and plainly, as the current Chief Rabbi has done recently, the facts and testimony about the targeting of the Uigher minority in western China. It means standing against the abuse of power.

This is not political correctness. It is just correct.

Today vigilance requires us to see that the Whig theory of history, that progress is a matter of time not direction, is wrong. The arc of the “moral universe” is certainly long, as Dr King wrote, but it does not naturally bend towards justice. It needs to be bent that way.

As the American scholar Robert Kagan has written: “The question is not what will bring down the liberal order, but what can possibly hold it up.”

The answer to the rise of impunity, I think, is the countervailing power that we build. Countervailing Power that sustains accountability and mitigates impunity. Countervailing Power that is universal in reach and personal in contribution.

If Holocaust Memorial Day teaches anything, let it be that while it is in the power of humankind to organize hate, it has equal and opposite power to put hate in check, and it is our individual and collective responsibility to do just that.