27 January 2003
Speech by the Chief secretary to the Treasury, Paul Boateng MP, at the Anne Frank Memorial
This is a day in which we remember of the victims of the Holocaust - and renew our commitment to the cause of ensuring that its lessons are learnt.
W e remember, through the diary of a little girl, the consequences of man's inhumanity to man - of what we are capable of, we who call ourselves human beings.
We also renew our determination to fight against extremism and prejudice - in all of its forms.
In reflecting on Anne and her life, it is her words that stay with us. Those words are her legacy. On June 15th 1944, three weeks before her arrest and subsequent deportation to Auschwitz, Anne wrote to Kitty, her diary:
"It is utterly impossible to build my life on a foundation of suffering, chaos, and death. I see the world being transformed into a wilderness. I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up to the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquillity will return once more. In the mean time I must hold onto my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I will be able to realise them."
"It is utterly impossible to build my life on a foundation of suffering, chaos, and death." Those words come to us across the generations. And as we remember with sadness the millions of lives - Jewish, Romany, gay, Catholic, the politicals, and others - all people who seem dissident or different - lost at Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buchenwald, Dachau, Ravensbruck, and the other concentration, transit, and forced labour camps - we owe them a debt we can never repay until we can say we have learnt the lessons. We cannot say that yet, and that is why we need the Anne Frank Trust, and the Trust needs everyone here today.
We cannot build a life, we cannot build a society, on the basis of intolerance, injustice, prejudice, for these are the roots of the suffering, chaos, and death of which Anne spoke.
We must build a society on mutual respect, tolerance, diversity; recognition that different cultures, different races, different religions, have something distinctive, unique, and valuable to contribute. It is in that very difference that the wealth of our society lies.
Through Anne's diary we learn not just about Anne but also of others who were lost. For the story of Anne and, through her diary, the untold story of those millions of others, is not just a story of tragic death, it is also a story of wasted potential. Anne dreamt of becoming a journalist. On April 5th 1944, she wrote:
"I finally realized that I must do my schoolwork to keep from being ignorant, to get on in life, to become a journalist, because that's what I want! I know I can write… I can't imagine living like Mother, Mrs. van Daan and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! ...
I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that's inside me!"
I believe that part of what we owe to Anne, part of how we can repay that debt, is this - that no child in the future be denied the chance to follow their ambitions and realise their dreams.
We live in a different world. But our responsibilities and our ideals remain. At home and abroad we have a responsibility, all of us, to work for the peace, the stability, the good society, of which Anne dreamed.
Today, we know the threats that exist to our nation and our values as a liberal democracy come not, as in those war years, from continental Europe, or as in the postwar years, from behind an iron curtain, but from rogue states, the world's worst leaders, and the pyrotechnic evil of the terrorist cell, fuelled by bigotry and hatred. That's from where the threat comes today and challenges us all.
And as we stand firm against the threat of violent regimes and the terrorist threat, the mass destruction that looms, so too we must take up arms against the underlying causes of risk and uncertainty: poverty and ignorance abroad; social exclusion that continues to haunt our society at home.
These are troubled and uncertain times for the world economy; in listening and talking to you this afternoon I have heard many examples from your experience. Twenty of the world's biggest economies have been or are in recession. These economies account for 60% of the world's output. World trade growth, which held up throughout both the world recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, fell twelve percentage points in 2001.
Unfolding events in Iraq, the impact of oil prices, concerns about corporate governance, problems in the IT industry, and current account imbalances have led to falls in investment, in the last two years, around the world.
We have been fortunate in our country. In the past, Britain has always suffered badly when the world economy was in trouble. Too often our economy has been the first into painful recession and the last to come out.
In our first term we took difficult decisions to bring much needed stability to the economy. All of you are partners in helping us to do this. We were right to do so: Britain is weathering these global storms much better than many of our competitors.
UK employment has stayed near record highs and unemployment near twenty year lows, whilst many of our major competitors have seen unemployment rates rise significantly over the past year or so. And the UK economy is currently enjoying its longest unbroken economic expansion since records began, with 41 consecutive quarters of GDP growth.
But we can't be complacent. Sure, the macro-economic framework we have established is providing a platform of stability through this troubled period, just as it did through the better global economic times of the last few years. True, our fiscal and monetary framework has been tested in the bad times as well as the good and it has not been found wanting.
But building a dynamic economy also requires us to build a just, decent, tolerant, society so that everyone is able to recognise and reach his or her full potential. We live in an interconnected world - the obligations which stretch beyond our borders and the risks that threaten to roll over them - we have to think about what it means to be tolerant, to be liberal, to give everyone the chance that Anne and too may of her generation never had - to be everything they can be and everything they dream to be. In a productive, modern economy, we cannot afford to waste the talents of one individual.
We have to move from sentiment to strategy. The pattern is clear - exclusion from education, from employment, from enterprise, is a recipe for social stagnation and economic inertia. Our commitment is equally clear: equality enshrined in law; opportunity for all; public services sensitive to the needs and experiences of all peoples regardless of race, origin, religion or gender; providing opportunity for all to maximize the potential of every individual at every stage in their life. This is not just an economic model, it is a moral obligation, and the two are interlinked.
The Anne Frank Trust, with their tireless work on education in schools and colleges up and down the country, with the recent launch of their awards for moral courage, with their work on diversity training with some of our biggest companies, and with the individual voluntary effort recognised in the recent award of an MBE to Bee Klug, is an example to us all. There is a responsibility on all of us - in government, in the businesses that many of you represent, in the voluntary and community sector - to work together to promote those liberal, democratic values, to foster an atmosphere which enables everyone to be everything they can be and, in so doing helps us, as a society, be everything we can be.
One of the most important features of this gathering is the way that public, private and voluntary sector have come together.
That, I believe, is the nature of our debt to Anne, the significance of our obligation to today's children - that all of us have a contribution to make. We must be able to move from sentiment to strategy - to be able to ensure that this never, ever, happens again.
ends