If I feel queasy at the spectacle of another public memorial, it is not because I fail to appreciate its importance. Auschwitz should be engraved in our memory as a testament to the evils we are capable of visiting on one another.

What jars is the disjuncture between our solemn vow of “Never Again”, to nods of collective commitment, and the xenophobia, anti-Semitism and racist attacks which continue to be a part of life, here and now.

Memorials give us the feeling that we have done something about these ghastly things for which others were responsible. We have closed a chapter on a dark book which we need only open to recall how far we have come.

We have not come as far as we would like to think.

Here in the UK, the number of violent attacks on Jews has increased to 77 this year. That does not include verbal assaults, damage to property, or graffiti on synagogues. The total number of anti-Semitic incidents has almost doubled to 304 a year - from 163 last year.

Jewish families who gathered to mourn the dead in a Hampshire cemetery found broken tombstones and the graves of their loved ones desecrated with swastikas.

A close-knit Jewish community in Northwest London have experienced so many assaults and intimidation that they set up a security alert system where they report violent incidents on their mobile phones. Friends and neighbours rush to the scene where the police are too late.

Attacks continue unabated in France, and across Europe marginal political parties advertise their hatred of Jews, calling for an end to the foreigners who ‘swamp’ their borders.

Central Europe is seeing a resurgence of Neo-Nazi activity and rightwing parties have made huge gains among the electorate. Even liberal voters across a theoretically borderless EU are calling for a more fortified collective frontier.

The language used to prevent Jews from entering our borders in the 1930s and 1940s has been resurrected for Eastern Europeans, Roma and Africans today. An increasingly rabid right-wing press alarms the public with often tall tales of illegal immigrants, while genuine refugees and victims of persecution are being refused asylum and sent back to their countries of origin to face detention, torture and in some cases, death.

Today we look back to not only the horrors of the Holocaust, but at the behaviour of so many who stood by, to make it all possible. More unsettling however, is the indifference of those who stand by to watch the abuses that continue today.

Tony Blair’s government sought out Roma passengers at a Czech airport, and stopped them boarding a plane to London. The House of Lords declared the government’s action illegal, and a breach of their human rights.

The revelation that in 2005, a supposedly progressive government had isolated people because they belonged to a specific ethnic group, and summarily detained them, should have made us all shudder in disbelief.

But we didn’t.

It took Law Lords to proclaim that such targeting was in the end, illegal.

The pathos doesn’t end there. Conservative Party leader Michael Howard – a son of Jewish immigrants – called for annual quotas on the number of people allowed to enter the UK. The kind of regime he vows to set up in the unlikely event that he is elected, could have prevented his parents from entering the country.

The growing climate of intolerance of foreigners is only possible because we think we have nothing to learn. That is why events which merely flag up the baggage of history without opening it, is of no use at all. One form of bigotry has replaced another. As we press our noses to the history of the Holocaust, we miss its wider implications.

Instead of uttering the vague emotive words, “Never Again,” we should outline the kinds of bigotry we refuse to abide, and hold everyone to account, from the thug to the Minister. We should stop our political representatives from lamenting one period of persecution, hatred and xenophobia, while being complicit in another.

Instead of meekly nodding away to a eulogy of present over past, perpetuating our misplaced moral indignation and self-righteousness, we need to write a manifesto for the future.

Kyle G. Brown (freelancemedia2000@yahoo.co.uk) is a broadcast journalist who works for the BBC and CBC in London.