Alan Mak MP: speeches

Speeches

• 11 Sept 2026 · 25th Anniversary of 9/11 · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to raise that point, and it is one that I will come to later in my speech. I was just saying to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) that it is right that we stand shoulder to shoulder with our friends and colleagues from the United States, because although the attack took place on American soil, it was a global tragedy. Its victims came from across the world. Its grief crossed borders and its consequences shaped the quarter of a century that followed. The work of the 9/11 memorial and museum in New York is guided by three simple principles: to honour, to educate and to inspire. Those principles should also guide us in how we mark this anniversary in Britain: honouring those who are lost, educating those too young to remember and drawing inspiration from the courage shown in the face of terror. For those of us old enough to remember that day, the events are seared into our memory. We remember where we were when we heard the news. We remember watching the images from New York and struggling to understand what we were seeing. We remember the shock of the second plane striking the second tower when it became clear that this was not an accident, and we remember the towers falling, knowing that thousands of people were still trapped inside. But the passage of 25 years creates a new responsibility. Every child now at school was born after the attacks. Many young adults have no personal memory of 9/11. Indeed, one current Member of this House was not yet born when the attacks took place. In fact, across the United Kingdom, around 20 million people—close to three in 10—have been born since the attacks. For a growing number of our population, 9/11 is not a memory; it is something they encounter only in textbooks, in online videos or in brief references during foreign policy discussions. For them, it is history. That change is inevitable, but forgetting is not. We must ensure that future generations understand what happened, who was lost and why the attacks still matter. Young people should understand that al-Qaeda’s terrorism was driven by a murderous ideology. They should also understand the extraordinary courage shown in response.

• 11 Sept 2026 · 25th Anniversary of 9/11 · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for his very positive intervention and for his work as an officer of the British-American Parliamentary Group. I am proud to serve on its executive. The Minister will have heard his request, which I certainly agree with. I agree that today’s anniversary is an opportunity to reaffirm our relationship with the United States and our wider faith in democracy and decency. The terrorists sought not only to murder innocent people on 9/11, but to destroy open societies, the relationships my hon. Friend talks about and the values that sustain them. They failed. The response to hatred was courage. The response to destruction was rescue and rebuilding. The response to human lives being lost is a determination to keep speaking their names. Remembrance is not passive. Instead, it requires active choices: to teach, to preserve and to tell the stories of individuals, rather than allowing them to disappear into history. Those who remember that morning must now pass on its story to those who do not. We owe it to the people who were murdered, including the 67 British victims; we owe it to families such as Sally’s, who have carried their loss for a quarter of a century; and we owe it to future generations, who must understand both the hatred displayed that day and the courage that came in response. Inscribed in the 9/11 museum’s memorial hall are words from Virgil’s “Aeneid” “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.” Inspired by Virgil’s poetry, we must ensure the victims of history’s deadliest terrorist attack are never lost to time. That is a responsibility carried by each generation, including ours, and it is one that we must always honour.