The Myth of Cable Street

The Battle of Cable Street still holds a proud place in anti-fascist memory, considered a decisive victory against the far right. In fact, the event boosted domestic fascism and antisemitism and made life far more unpleasant for its Jewish victims, explains Daniel Tilles.





On October 4th, 1936, following days of frantic, last-minute organisation, a crowd of over 100,000 protesters congregated in London’s East End. Their single aim was to prevent the passage of 5,000 black-shirted supporters of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), who a week earlier had announced plans to march through the area to mark the fourth anniversary of his party’s formation. Despite the best efforts of the police to clear a path for the procession, the protestors stood resolutely firm. Left with little other choice Mosley conceded defeat and disbanded his followers. Around 80 anti-fascists had been arrested, at least 73 police officers injured – but most importantly, the Fascists did not pass.

The demonstration has come to be seen, particularly on the political left, as the moment London’s working class united en masse to reject fascism’s hateful ideology once and for all: ‘The spectacle of the workers in action gave the Fascists reason to pause’, claimed Ted Grant, a participant in the demonstration and later an influential socialist thinker. ‘It induced widespread despondency and demoralisation in their ranks ... [and] the East End Fascist movement declined.’ Cable Street is still invoked in today’s fight against the extreme right, with the Unite Against Fascism pressure group describing it as a ‘turning point in the struggle against Fascism in Britain’. The battle also holds a proud place in the collective memory of the Anglo-Jewish community, described by one historian as ‘the most remembered day in 20th-century British Jewish history’.


Like Mussolini’s Fascist Party, upon which it was modelled, the BUF had initially paid little attention to what it described as the ‘irrelevant’ Jewish question. Although the movement contained individuals who favoured an antisemitic policy, Mosley’s aim was to create an outwardly reputable political party. As such, he permitted violence only when it was ‘defensive’ and eschewed racial prejudice. His approach reaped some success, with party membership reaching 50,000 within two years.

This all changed over the summer of 1934 when a wave of organised anti-fascist disruption struck BUF events around Britain, prompting a violent response. Disorder at a mass meeting in June at London’s Olympia Hall, where Mosley’s stewards brutally ejected hecklers, was especially damaging to the Blackshirts’ reputation. With its façade of respectability stripped away and Britain’s gradual recovery from the Great Depression rendering Mosley’s sophisticated economic programme increasingly obsolete the BUF collapsed, its membership falling to around a tenth of its peak. The party was left in desperate need of a new ideological impetus. Following discussion with his senior lieutenants Mosley resolved to incorporate antisemitism into official policy, announcing the decision in late September. This proved particularly popular in the East End, a district with a long history of tension between Jews and gentiles. It had been the principal point of first settlement for the 150,000 or so Eastern European Jews who had arrived in Britain since the 1880s, increasing competition for housing and jobs in this deprived part of London. By the 1930s, with Britain’s largest concentration of Jews still to be found in the area, it proved fertile territory for the BUF’s racial incitement and between 1935 and 1937 the party committed the majority of its resources to campaigning there. In addition to the offensive and inflammatory language employed by his street-corner orators Mosley’s followers were also responsible for a growing number of physical attacks on Jews.

Unsurprisingly local Jews felt compelled to retaliate. They came to play a central role in Britain’s anti-fascist movement through growing participation in existing organisations opposed to the BUF, such as trade unions and the Communist Party, and via newly formed Jewish defence bodies, most prominent of which was the Jewish People’s Council (JPC), founded in mid-1936. Mosley’s announcement of the October procession, which was to include many Jewish neighbourhoods on its route, caused particular outrage. With the Communist Party’s leadership initially reluctant to support a proposed counter-demonstration for fear of association with the inevitable disorder – only relenting at the very last minute  – much of the responsibility for its coordination fell on the JPC and other Jewish organisations.

Memoirs of the period attest to the pride felt among Jews at their participation in the occasion, a sense that they, standing side by side with their non-Jewish neighbours, had driven the Fascists out of east London: ‘The sound-hearted British working-class had given ... a clear message,’ Morris Beckman, at the time a teenager living in Hackney, later recounted; Jews had shown ‘they were sick and ashamed of keeping their heads down’. Like Ted Grant, he remembered that day as ‘the high water mark of the British Union of Fascists’ hubris and arrogance, the very moment that ... the tide began to recede’. Bill Fishman, then a 15-year-old witness to the protests and subsequently a prominent historian of East End Jewish life, recalled that ‘Oswald Mosley’s popularity began to wane after his setback in Cable Street.’

An immense impetus

Yet such perceptions bear little relation to the actual repercussions of the event. Contemporary records, in contrast to the romanticised recollections of those on the anti-fascist side, tell a different story. Far from signalling the demise of fascism in the East End, or bringing respite to its Jewish victims, Cable Street had quite the opposite effect. Over the following months the BUF was able to convert defeat on the day into longer-term success and to justify a further radicalisation of its anti-Jewish campaign.

Within days the party’s newspaper, Blackshirt, was boasting that the incident had given Fascism ‘an immense impetus’. The BUF regularly exaggerated the strength of its support, but this particular claim was more than spurious bravado. In its monthly report on extremist political activity Special Branch observed in October ‘abundant evidence that the Fascist movement has been steadily gaining ground in many parts of east London’. Its sources suggested an influx of over 2,000 new recruits in the capital, a considerable boost given that party membership in London had stood at less than 3,000 earlier in the year.

In the week after Cable Street the BUF ‘conducted the most successful series of meetings since the beginning of the movement’, attracting crowds of thousands and little opposition. Mosley made an ‘enthusiastically received’ address to an audience of 12,000 at Victoria Park Square, which was followed by a peaceful march to nearby Limehouse. By contrast the Communists’ efforts to consolidate their victory had ‘met with a very poor response’. ‘A definite pro-Fascist feeling has manifested itself’, the Special Branch report concluded: ‘The alleged Fascist defeat is in reality a Fascist advance.’

The reason the BUF was able to profit so handsomely from what had initially appeared a setback was that, at this stage, it thrived off the publicity that violent opposition produced. The national media, under pressure from the government, largely avoided reporting on Fascist activity other than when disorder occurred. A leading Mosleyite lamented the ‘total silence’ in the press when BUF events passed without incident, complaining that only after disruption by opponents did newspapers show any interest.

When such incidents took place the party was able with some success to portray itself as a victim. It claimed that its efforts to exercise free speech legally, through organised meetings and police-approved processions, were being systematically suppressed by left-wing extremists. Whatever the truth of such allegations – and it was certainly the case that anti-fascists were responsible for the majority of disorder, albeit often in the face of Fascist provocation – the Blackshirts elicited a degree of sympathy in certain quarters. After the Olympia meeting, for example, although respectable supporters abandoned the BUF in droves, there was also a short-term influx of new recruits angry at attempts to silence Mosley.

A propaganda advantage

In many ways the Fascists came to rely on the interaction with their opponents to sustain interest in the movement. One member in the south-west expressed his optimism that, ‘now we have active opposition in Exeter I think we shall make great progress there’. In this context Cable Street simply thrust the BUF back into the limelight after two years of relative national obscurity and provided it with a stage on which to play out its claims of victimhood. This, Mosley argued, had been a perfectly lawful procession, sanctioned by the authorities. The East End housed the core of his supporters. They had every right peacefully to express their political beliefs, yet had been forcibly prevented from doing so by a disorderly mob. This portrayal of events clearly struck a chord with many locals. In an internal document the Fascists observed that the ‘strong sense of local patriotism’ in the East End had been ‘gravely offended by the rioting of Jews and Communists last October ... [which] was felt as a disgrace to the good name of east London’.

The reference to Jews was particularly telling, for their prominent involvement at Cable Street was also eagerly exploited by the Blackshirts. Mosley’s adoption of antisemitism in 1934 was from the outset portrayed not as a choice but as a move forced upon him by Jews themselves. ‘Small’ Jews had attacked the Blackshirts in the street and invaded their meetings, while ‘big’ Jews financed the anti-fascist  movement and used their wealth and influence to turn the media and government against the BUF. It had also become clear, Mosley alleged, that Jews were the power behind Fascism’s two chief adversaries: international finance and Communism.



By adopting an anti-Jewish stance, therefore, the BUF was simply taking up ‘the challenge thrown down by Jewry’. Moreover it was doing so on behalf of the real British people, who were also suffering at the hands of Jewish economic and political oppression. Such claims were of course disingenuous; some Jews had been involved in the early anti-fascist  movement, but the vast majority were not, while a handful even joined the BUF. But they became a self-fulfilling prophecy: the Fascists’ growing antisemitism prompted an increasingly hostile response from the Jewish community, which was in turn used to vindicate and harden the BUF’s position.

Cable Street – the most substantial manifestation of Jewish anti-fascism to date – fitted the BUF’s narrative perfectly. The internal publication mentioned above noted with satisfaction that ‘the impudent use of violence ... to deny east Londoners the right to walk through their own part of London ... [had] sent a wave of anti-Jewish resentment’ through the area. Speakers were advised that propaganda should take advantage of this fact.

The demonstration was immediately branded by the BUF as ‘Jewry’s biggest blunder’, while the police were accused of ‘openly surrender[ing] to alien mobs’. It was claimed that ‘financial democracy’ and ‘Soviet-inspired Communists’ had colluded to inhibit legitimate activity by ‘British patriots’ in the East End. As a result, the district had in effect been ‘handed over ... as the Jews’ own territory’. It was time, the BUF declared, for the true British people to reclaim their land. Such appeals were well received. Special Branch recorded that among the cohort of new Fascist recruits were a ‘large number of gentiles with grievances against the Jews’.

Antisemitism intensifies

However Cable Street did not merely reinforce Blackshirt antisemitism – it exacerbated it. Just as Jewish involvement in anti-fascist activity had been exploited to justify the introduction of antisemitic policy in 1934, so it was now used as an excuse to elevate it to a new, more radical phase. A source within BUF headquarters – who, appalled by the BUF’s increasingly extreme direction, had begun leaking information to the Board of Deputies, British Jewry’s representative body – revealed that the party was intent on using the events of October 4th as the basis from which to embark on ‘a renewed antisemitic campaign’. This was in any case made abundantly clear in propaganda, which rapidly became saturated with crude anti-Jewish rhetoric. In the six months leading up to October, around 21 per cent of articles in Blackshirt included antisemitic content; in the subsequent half-year the figure almost doubled to 39 per cent.

Even more worrying, words were increasingly being translated into action. In the immediate aftermath of Cable Street a Blackshirt speaker promised ‘by God there is going to be a pogrom ... [and] the people who have caused this ... are the Yids’. The very next weekend saw the most serious antisemitic violence of the interwar period, as a gang of 200 youths, some armed with iron bars and hatchets, wrecked and looted Jewish shops, set alight a car and threw an elderly Jewish man and young child through a window. This marked the beginning of a sustained period of harassment. The JPC noted with concern that early 1937 had witnessed ‘an intensification of Fascist Jew-baiting and hooliganism’. Over the summer this developed into full-scale ‘terrorism which appears to increase week by week’. Numerous Jews were assaulted and shop windows smashed, antisemitic graffiti proliferated and Fascist speeches became more vitriolic.

This fact was confirmed by the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Philip Game, who observed, eight months after Cable Street, that the ‘abuse of Jews by Fascist speakers has shown a tendency to increase’. Compounding the problem, the BUF now increasingly held its events in localities inhabited almost exclusively by Jews, meaning that even those who attempted to stay away were ‘compelled to attend the meetings because the loudspeakers used are such that every word spoken percolates into the houses’, as Neville Laski, the president of the Board of Deputies, complained to Game.

The focal point of this campaign was two sets of local elections in 1937. At the London County Council polls in March Mosley put forward six candidates, all in East End constituencies. From the outset this was advertised as a choice ‘between us and the Parties of Jewry’ (meaning every other party), an indication that the BUF’s first ever election campaign would be fought on a primarily antisemitic platform. Its manifesto mentioned Jews or ‘aliens’ 22 times in two pages of text. Playing on the longstanding antipathy towards Jews in the area, the BUF claimed that it had come seeking the ‘expert opinion’ of local residents as ‘no one knows better than the people of east London the stranglehold that Jewry has on our land’. It wished to obtain from them ‘a mandate to carry through our National Socialist policy, especially as it concerns the Jewish question’.

That the party subsequently failed to win a single seat at the election has often been cited as a sign of the BUF’s post-Cable Street collapse. But in fact this ostensible failure masked a significant show of support. Standing against candidates from the three mainstream parties, the Blackshirts received votes from 7,000 residents (18 per cent of the electorate) in Bethnal Green, Limehouse and Shoreditch. This result was achieved despite only ratepayers being allowed to vote, disenfranchising many of the BUF’s disproportionately young supporters. Furthermore a large portion of the electorate was Jewish (around 20 per cent of Bethnal Green’s population, for example), meaning that the BUF may have won up to 30 per cent of non-Jewish votes in the constituency. The election indicated that the BUF could still claim the support of thousands in its East End heartland. Later in the year, at October’s borough council elections, the party attained a similar proportion of the vote in the same districts.

The drift towards Nazism

Given that BUF membership had fallen as low as 5,000 in 1935, the idea that the aftermath of Cable Street marked a low point for the movement can be dismissed. In fact it was a period of relative, if highly localised, success. Moreover the election results were interpreted by the BUF as confirmation that the people of the East End wished ‘Mosley to proceed with his anti-Jewish policy’. Consequently antisemitism remained integral to BUF campaigns over the remainder of its existence.

The movement did go on to experience a dip in fortunes in late 1937 and 1938, which some have claimed as an indirect triumph for disruptive anti-fascism. This was because Cable Street and events like it had fuelled public debate on the problem of political extremism, resulting in the passing of the Public Order Act (POA) designed to restrict such provocative activity. Yet its impact on the BUF was minimal. Though the Home Office was now accorded greater powers to prohibit political processions in the East End, this simply displaced BUF marches to other parts of the city. This brought some relief to the Jews of east London, but any benefits were more than offset by an increase in other forms of Blackshirt activity. In August to December 1936, for example, 508 Fascist meetings were recorded in the East End; in the equivalent period a year later, the number grew by a quarter, to 647.

The POA did introduce stricter directives on provocative racial language, which restrained Fascist rhetoric a little. But the new rules were inconsistently applied by police and in any case were often circumvented by the use of veiled terms such as ‘aliens’ or ‘Shylocks’. Additionally, these new legal restrictions were used to substantiate further the Blackshirts’ claims of persecution, with the government once more accused of ‘capitulation to Jewish power’.

Rather than the POA or anti-fascism, it was financial difficulties that accounted for the BUF’s temporary decline. The secret subsidies it had received from Mussolini had begun to diminish as Mosley drifted closer to the Nazis and their model of fascism over the mid-1930s, finally drying up altogether in 1937. This forced the party, in March of that year, to reduce expenditure by 70 per cent and lay off a large number of staff, including many leading figures. Inevitably, its ability to campaign suffered. Candidates standing in October’s elections, for example, did so with no assistance from party headquarters.



However, over 1938-39 the party’s fortunes were dramatically revived. The growing prospect of war with Germany prompted Mosley to launch a ‘Peace Campaign’, arguing that Britain had no interest in joining any European conflict. This tapped into genuine public misgivings regarding the necessity of war, drawing thousands of new supporters to the party. Moreover, Mosley’s claim that international tensions were being stoked by Jews, who were attempting to engineer a ‘war of revenge’ against Germany, guaranteed that antisemitism continued to play a prominent role in propaganda.

The demonstrators at Cable Street, and their successors in the anti-fascist  movement, have understandably taken pride in their achievements that day. Yet far from signalling the beginning of the end for fascism in Britain, or even in the East End, the demonstration yielded a significant short-term boost for the BUF, and did nothing to hinder it in the longer term. True, it succeeded in demonstrating the strength of hostility to Mosley, confirming that his political ambitions would never be realised. But this had long been clear. By 1936 the BUF was a local irritant but a national irrelevance and destined to remain that way. Instead, Cable Street drew unnecessary attention and new adherents to the party. However laudable the motivation of the Jewish participants that day, the primary consequence of their actions was to make life significantly worse for their fellow Jews in the East End, with their involvement used to justify the commencement of the most intensive phase of anti-semitic activity in modern British history.

Daniel Tilles is a doctoral candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is co-editor of the collection Fascism and the Jews: Italy and Britain (Vallentine Mitchell, 2011).




http://www.historytoday.com/daniel-tilles/myth-cable-street


How telling is this in regards to the likes of Antifa and their supporters today?

Like I say, people never learn from history. Thinking that street violence is the key to stopping the Far Right. It ends up having the opposite effect.

How a view of free speech is played on and that it is being denied. A view of being denied the right to protest. Using fear and the loss of rights to garner support.  It provides the Far Right with the publicity it needs and media attention it yearns for. Violence as seen will lead to them claiming a victim status. Where even worse the Far Right gain support and we see an increase in hate and discrimination.

They also never learned how it never stemmed the tide of Nazism. That had a mass escalation of violence on the streets of Germany.

The only battle that is required, is one on ideas/beliefs.

To challenge poor ideas and beliefs of hate. Where people stand united against such hate.

Bumped for a certain lefty to actually learn from history.

Didge wrote:Bumped for a certain lefty to actually learn from history.

Interesting article.    We often forget history, and that human nature doesn't actually change that much and that mistakes are repeated again and again.

Those guys with the black shirts?    You look at them and think 'who the fuck do they think they are'.  And yet there's something diabolically compelling about them.   You can understand how the weak are inspired to follow.

HoratioTarr wrote:

Didge wrote:Bumped for a certain lefty to actually learn from history.

Interesting article.    We often forget history, and that human nature doesn't actually change that much and that mistakes are repeated again and again.

Those guys with the black shirts?    You look at them and think 'who the fuck do they think they are'.  And yet there's something diabolically compelling about them.   You can understand how the weak are inspired to follow.

Glad you found it interesting Horatio.

I agree on your points.

LONDON — The “Battle of Cable Street,” as it has come to be called, represents a rare moment of shared pride for many British Jews and the country’s left.

On October 4, 1936, between 100,000 and 300,000 people — Jews, Irish dockers, trade unionists, socialists and communists — gathered in the East End of London determined to prevent a planned fascist march through the city’s main Jewish neighborhood.

Barricades, including a bus and a tram, were used to block Cable Street. Improvised weaponry — sticks, rocks, chair legs, rubbish, rotten vegetables and the contents of chamber pots — were readied, and children were deployed to roll marbles under the hooves of the police horses. And the slogan “they shall not pass,” echoing that of the Spanish republicans’ fight against Franco’s coup earlier that summer, was chanted.

Despite baton charges and strenuous attempts by the police to clear the streets, fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley was eventually forced to accept the inevitable and order the 5,000 Blackshirts of his British Union of Fascists into a humiliating retreat. Police escorted them back towards central London.

“This was almost unprecedented in British political history — and testified to the radicalism of the Jews who carried with them the memories of persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe,” historian Colin Schindler has argued.

The left wing and Jewish press united in joy at the outcome. “Battles Stop Mosley March,” declared banner headlines on the Labour-supporting Daily Herald, while the Communist party’s Daily Worker led its report with: “Mosley Did Not Pass: East London Routs the Fascists.” The Jewish Chronicle was barely less exuberant. “The People Said ‘No!’” its story of the events in the East End was headlined.

Today, the Battle of Cable Street is frequently cited as the moment at which British fascism was decisively defeated, and held up as an example of both the historical ties between the left and the Jewish community, and as a model for how a resurgent far right can be similarly vanquished.

“The Battle of Cable Street was a turning point,” suggested the BBC in an article commemorating the event’s 75th anniversary, while Israel’s ambassador, Mark Regev, has lauded it as a “milestone in the struggle against fascism and antisemitism.” For Hope Not Hate, the UK’s much-respected anti-extremism campaign group, Cable Street is nothing less than “the greatest anti-fascist victory on British soil.”

This narrative received a further boost last month when the British government’s heritage body, Historic England, designated Cable Street as one of the country’s top 100 places which “bring to life England’s rich history.” The landmark was picked by historian David Olusoga in a category designed to identify England’s 10 most important sites showing the “history of power, protest and progress.”

“Although this was a violent protest, as a nation we should be more aware and proud of the Battle of Cable Street,” Olusoga argued. The protest, he argued, heralded “a victory for the Jewish community, the people of the East End, and anti-fascists everywhere.”

The landmark designation is no mean feat. Cable Street shares the accolade alongside the Palace of Westminster — which houses the British parliament — and such iconic locations as the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset, where the first trade unions were formed, and the military bunker in west London from which the Royal Air Force’s battle against Hitler’s attempt to invade the UK in the summer of 1940 was directed.

It is not hard to see why the Battle of Cable Street has gained renewed significance in recent years.

With far-right populists gaining ground across Europe over the past decade, the lessons of how and why Britain failed to develop a successful, homegrown fascist party in the 1930s are important ones.

Two years ago, when London marked the 80th anniversary of the battle of Cable Street, the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, argued that it offered a “roadmap” in how to defeat extremists.

“It’s so important to recognize that history tells us there are people who would divide our communities — and history tells us the roadmap to defeat them,” he told the Jewish News.

The mayor’s sentiments were echoed by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who told a commemorative event attended by politicians and the community leaders that “it was here that we learned the lesson of the power of unity. So many individuals, groups and families gained added strength from the numbers of people who poured on to the streets.”

Hope not Hate agrees. “Cable Street,” it has argued, “showed how important it was to forge common unity in the face of organized hatred, and to stand up alongside vulnerable communities.” It has even produced a special multimedia website detailing the story of Mosley’s humiliation.

Indeed, such is Cable Street’s mythic status that it has been held up as a model by the American “antifa” movement.

“For many members of contemporary anti-Fascist groups,” the New Yorker’s Daniel Penny has argued, “the incident remains central to their mythology, a kind of North Star in the fight against Fascism and white supremacy across Europe and, increasingly, the United States.”

In his “Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook,” US academic and left-wing activist Mark Bray lauds the example of how the mass, united front shown at Cable Street effectively killed off the Blackshirts.

Last year’s clashes between white nationalists and anti-fascist protesters in Charlottesville sparked immediate comparisons.

“The left has a history of breaking such contemptible political currents, and it is that history that we must tap into and learn from today,” wrote Douglas Williams in The Guardian. “As the battle of Cable Street proved in 1936, and the civil rights movement proved again and again across the south in the 1960s, the only way to defeat fascists and white supremacists is to meet them head-on in confrontation, with strong working-class social movements in the streets.”

Corbyn’s well-publicized personal connection
But it is not just the battle against the far right with which Cable Street is frequently associated. As the Labour party has been rocked by allegations of anti-Semitism under Jeremy Corbyn’s hard-left leadership, Corbyn has frequently raised his personal connection to events in the East End eight decades ago as a form of defense.

Questioned on television during the 2015 Labour leadership contest about his alleged links to Holocaust denier Paul Eisen, Corbyn leapt straight to this line. “My mother stood in Cable Street alongside the Jewish people and the Irish people,” he told Channel 4 News. “We all have a duty to oppose any kind of racism wherever it raises its head.”

A year later, the Labour leader delivered an uncharacteristically personal and emotional speech at the main commemorative event marking the 80th anniversary of Cable Street. Speaking of the “deep personal significance” the confrontation held for him, Corbyn declared: “One woman stood there along with many others and she told me all about it. That woman was my mother. She stood here with so many others because she wanted to live in a world, as we all do, that is free from xenophobia and free from hate. Those that stood here in 1936 did an enormous service.”

This appearance is oft-cited by Corbyn’s supporters. Thus, when the Labour leader was accused in March of having defended an anti-Semitic mural located not far from Cable Street, the pro-Corbyn Evolve Politics website argued: “Corbyn has campaigned tirelessly to try and eradicate all types of racism and discrimination in whatever form they come in, but his incredibly powerful speech at Cable Street in 2016 is possibly the best example to show that he is, in fact, the exact opposite of an anti-Semite.”

In the midst of the furor, Corbyn himself issued a statement arguing that “the Tower Hamlets mural I celebrate is the one which commemorates the mobilization of East London’s Jewish community in the anti-fascist demonstrations against Mosley’s Blackshirts in Cable Street in 1936.”

In fact, Corbyn’s references have now become a source of mockery and anger.

“Did you know that Jeremy Corbyn’s mother fought at the Battle of Cable Street?” The Times columnist Hugo Rifkind sarcastically began a column after March’s revelations. “I know it’s a well-kept political secret.” Others in the community have adopted a sharper tone, saying Corbyn “wraps himself in the flag” of Cable Street, and attempts to use his mother’s attendance as “moral armor.”

Regev has also noted the incongruity of those on the hard left who hail the manner in which fascists were confronted in Cable Street, while aligning themselves with anti-Semitic terror groups which seek to destroy Israel.

Referencing the Iran-imported, anti-Semitic Al Quds Day parade which takes place in London each year — and which Corbyn attended prior to becoming Labour leader — the ambassador noted: “It is one thing to savor the memory of marching down Cable Street against the British Union of Fascists 80 years ago. But if today you find yourself marching down Oxford Street in solidarity with the anti-Semitic Islamists of Hamas and Hezbollah, then you need to stop what you are doing, turn around, and start marching in the opposite direction.”

Many historians believe that the principal problem with attempting to draw lessons and evoke the memory of Cable Street is the under appreciation of the events that followed it.

“Cable Street went down in history as a decisive check to fascism,” Martin Pugh argues in his study “Hurrah For The Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars.” “In reality it was nothing of the sort.”

Three principal myths surround Cable Street and its aftermath.

First, the confrontation which took place that day in the East End was not between the fascists and their enemies, but between the police and those who were determined to prevent the Blackshirts from marching. Thus, approximately 80 anti-Mosley protesters were arrested and at least 73 police officers injured.

Second, Cable Street did not bring an end to fascist activity in the East End. Quite the opposite.

The Blackshirts’ retreat turned out to be a temporary, strategic one. In the aftermath of it, Mosley’s henchmen issued blood-curdling threats. “It is about time the British people of the East End knew that London’s pogrom is not very far away now,” warned high-ranking thug Mick Clarke. “Mosley is coming every night of the week in the future to rid East London and by God there is going to be a pogrom.”

In reality, Mosley did not come “every night of the week.” As his biographer, Robert Skidelsky, notes, it actually suited the Blackshirt leader to heed police advice and call off the Cable Street march, as he wished to be in Berlin the next day to secretly marry Diana Mitford at the home of Joseph Goebbels.

But Clarke’s words were grimly prophetic. The weekend after Cable Street saw the worst incident of anti-Jewish violence in Britain during the interwar period — the “Pogrom of Mile End” — when 200 Blackshirt youths ran amok in Stepney in the East End, smashing the windows of Jewish shops and homes and throwing an elderly man and young girl through a window. Though less serious, attacks on Jews were also reported in Manchester and Leeds in the north of England.

Mosley’s British Union of Fascists cleverly managed to turn defeat at Cable Street into a propaganda victory of sorts. They portrayed themselves as the innocent party whose rights to free speech had been denied by the “red terror” of “Communist-Jewish violence,” a police who had “openly surrendered to alien mobs,” and “a government that cannot govern.”

The Blackshirts ramped up the anti-Semitic content. Mosley held a series of large rallies across the East End (one attracted a crowd of 12,000 people), and membership in the capital jumped by 2,000 — part of a “definite pro-fascist” shift, reported Special Branch.

“However laudable the motivation of the Jewish participants that day,” the historian Daniel Tilles has written of Cable Street, “the primary consequence of their actions was to make life significantly worse for their fellow Jews in the East End, with their involvement used to justify the commencement of the most intensive phase of anti-Semitic activity in modern British history.”

Finally, the Blackshirts were not defeated on the streets, but by the resilience of parliamentary democracy and the main political parties which were committed to it.

Just over six months after Cable Street, Mosley attempted an electoral breakthrough in the East End, where the party’s support was highest. But, playing the anti-Semitism card ruthlessly — the choice was between “us and the parties of Jewry,” the Fascists claimed — Blackshirt candidates in local elections managed to pull only around one-fifth of the vote.

Moreover, the Fascists’ jibe that the government couldn’t govern rang rather hollow when — at the urging of the police, who did not much appreciate the invidious position they had been put in at Cable Street — a Public Order Act was swiftly pushed through parliament. Albeit imperfect, the legislation banned the wearing of political uniforms in public and increased police powers to prohibit marches (which were regularly renewed in the East End). Police also began arresting and prosecuting speakers at political events who directed grossly abusive language against Jews.

Over the next two years, as the drumbeats of war grew louder, Mosley reinvented himself as a peace campaigner. With a general election due in 1940 — which ended up being postponed due to the outbreak of war — it was a cause which offered far greater political dividends than Jew-baiting in the East End, even if anti-Semitism underpinned Mosley’s claims that it was the Jews who were pushing Britain inexorably into conflict with Hitler.

Nonetheless, Mosley’s campaign to put “Britain First” aligned him with the appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain’s government and mined a rich seam of public opinion. Membership of the BUF rose and his peace rally at Earls Court in July 1939 attracted some 20,000 people.

When war came two months later, however, a party so closely tied in the public mind to the country with which Britain was by then engaged in an existential fight lost much of the little support it then had.

None of this should, of course, detract from the important sense of solidarity which many East End Jews gained from Cable Street.

“My mother said there were only two types of people in the world. Jews and Jew-haters,” Bernard Kops, who was 10 years old in 1936, recalled in a BBC documentary.

“Of course, when Cable Street came along, the Irish labourers and dockers came out and it was them that really made sure Mosley didn’t get through,” said Kops. “My mother and father really had to change their minds after that and accept that others did come to help us out.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-true-history-behind-londons-much-lauded-anti-fascist-battle-of-cable-street/

Another great article on this historic event