I thank Paul O’Kane for securing the debate on this important issue, and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for all the work that it does. I also thank Paul O’Kane in advance for hosting the Scottish national Holocaust event next week, when the Parliament will welcome pupils from Northfield academy in my constituency, who I believe will be speaking at the event. I am always pleased to see young folk from Aberdeen coming into our Parliament.

As the motion notes, the theme of this year’s Holocaust memorial day is “Fragility of Freedom”. Over the past few years and across the world, people’s freedoms feel much more fragile.

When I was younger, I remember thinking of the Holocaust as a one-off tragedy—an act of unspeakable evil, carried out by evil folk, who just kind of disappeared at the end of the war. Over the years—especially the past few years—I have come to realise that the Holocaust and other genocides are at the end of what tends to be a long journey. I have come to realise that the folk who carried out those acts were not always evil—that they were once quite ordinary, and that many went back to living ordinary lives. I have come to realise that saying, “Never again,” is, sadly, just an aspiration rather than the promise that it should be.

I have also come to realise how many challenges the groups that were targeted in the Holocaust continue to face. Can any of us say, hand on heart, that, in the past few months, we have not seen, at home or abroad, any bigotry and discrimination that is aimed at Jews, Gypsy Travellers, those with disabilities, or the LGBT+ community? I cannot say so. I think that those things are becoming more common and, in some circles, are starting to be seen as acceptable.

That situation is very dangerous, and we need to challenge it whenever and wherever we see it, because, before the death camps, there was the discrimination, the dehumanisation and the turning of folk against their own fellow man. I fear that we are not doing enough to prevent that from happening again.

When the details of the Holocaust first emerged, folk reacted with horror, and the world said, “Never again.” However, in the years since, and with varying degrees of recognition, we have continued to see that sort of atrocity. We saw mass killings in Guatemala and said, “Never again.” We saw them in Bangladesh and said, “Never again.” We saw them in East Timor and said, “Never again.” We have seen them in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Zaire, Darfur, Iraq, Syria and Myanmar, and we keep saying, “Never again.” In the years to come, when that list is, inevitably, even longer, will we just keep on saying, “Never again”?

Looking ahead, instead of just saying, “Never again”, we need to say, loudly and clearly, what we are saying today—as individuals and as a nation, at home and abroad. When we see discrimination, dehumanisation, persecution, and mass killings, we need to call those for what they are and call for them to stop. That is the least that we can do to show that we have learned the lessons of history, and to make “Never again” a reality.