I thank Paul O’Kane for leading this year’s debate.

Since I was first elected, I have spoken in a number of Holocaust memorial debates. Today, I had a look through my notes from those earlier speeches. One of the core purposes of the day is to remind us of the need to work proactively to ensure that something like the Holocaust could never happen again. Those seven years of notes made for pretty depressing reading.

In 2017, I spoke about how fascists create their own alternative reality, then set about making the rest of society believe in it. That alternative reality is a hateful false reality, in which some people are less than human.

We are all familiar with how the Nazis went about systematically dehumanising Jews, Slavic people, Roma, LGBT people, disabled people and others, and with the importance of media support to their success in doing that, which Paul O’Kane referred to in his opening speech.

We are a century on from the start of the Nazis’ rise to power, but have we really learned the lessons of the darkest period in human history? A century ago, the owner of

The Daily Mail aligned himself with Hitler and ran the headline, “Hurrah for the blackshirts”.

The first time I spoke in a debate such as this, seven years ago,

The Sun

—this country’s biggest-selling newspaper—had recently published a column that described refugees crossing the Mediterranean as “cockroaches” who should be stopped by gunships—language that caused the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights to intervene to point out that that was exactly how the Nazis had described Jews and other groups. Today, we see dehumanising language being used against the desperate and vulnerable people who are crossing the English Channel, against trans people, against Palestinians and against other marginalised groups.

The Holocaust did not start with gas chambers, the Rwandan genocide did not start with machete-wielding gangs, and the Bosnian genocide did not start with the massacre at Srebrenica. They started with dehumanising language and misinformation, with extremists pushing the limits of debate, and with efforts made to suppress the voices of the groups that were being targeted. Can we really say that the 21st century United Kingdom is doing all that it can do to live up to the commitment that the Holocaust must never happen again?

Seven years ago, Donald Trump had just taken office and major publications in the United States were running puff pieces on neo-Nazis with headlines such as,

“Meet the dapper white supremacist riding the Trump wave”— the “dapper white supremacist”. This year, the prospect of Trump returning to the White House is a distressingly realistic one. How must the Jewish community in America feel when his first election was quickly followed by events such as those at Charlottesville, where uniformed white men held a torch-lit march chanting,

“Jews will not replace us”?

Across Europe, the far-right surge that appeared to have subsided a few years ago has begun again. A left-to-right broad democratic front may have taken back the Government in Poland, but fascists have just won a shock victory in the Netherlands on a platform that demonises Muslims in exactly the same way as the Nazis’ early platform demonised Jews. Sweden’s centre-right Government is entirely dependent on fascist members to stay in office, and Italy’s Prime Minister leads a party that traces its lineage straight back to Mussolini.

Germany has just been rocked by revelations that senior figures from the AfD party attended a meeting with neo-Nazis that included a presentation on how they could go about deporting people who are not ethnically German if they ever took power, which is not a distant prospect when the AfD is currently polling in second place nationally and in first place across swathes of eastern Germany. The cordon sanitaire is fraying and, in a clear and distressing parallel with Germany’s ruling parties a century ago, mainstream politicians who are desperate to hold on to or get into government are co-operating with the far right and with those who trace their roots back to the fascists who brought about that dark period in our history.

When you treat fascism as simply another political view, you have conceded legitimacy that it does not deserve and should never have. Its ideas become an acceptable part of mainstream discussion when inciting genocide is not an acceptable or legitimate point of view, and believing that you can win the argument by giving those people at platform for debate and then challenging them misunderstands the problem.

Fascism is not rational. Fascists and others who advance dangerous and lethal agendas are not interested in winning the debate. They just want to implement their wicked world view, and they are not going to play by the rules that the rest of us follow in a liberal and democratic society because they do not want a liberal and democratic society in which their argument might win a battle of ideas. We cannot ever allow them to win again.

Today, we remember the victims of humanity’s worst crime, when 9 million people, including 6 million Jews, were slaughtered in the Holocaust. We must think seriously about how we turn our determination never to allow that to happen again into a practical reality. It is not enough not to be a racist or a fascist; we must all be active anti-racists and anti-fascists. That is the only way in which our statements of “Never again” can truly mean something.