Cable Street 88 years on: battling fascists then and now
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/cable-street-88-years-battling-fascists-then-and-now Many articles from the Morning Star today
DAVID ROSENBERG assesses the far-right threat in the wake of the summer’s Islamophobic pogroms and asks what lessons we can learn from the 1930s
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Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer spoke of “thuggery” and was especially concerned that police were attacked, though the main targets of what anti-fascist activists prefer to label “pogroms” by an insurgent far-right were long-settled Muslim communities and current asylum-seekers, including many Muslims. Yet Starmer would not let the word “Islamophobia” cross his lips.
There were attempts to set fire to hotels temporarily housing refugees, and threats made against law firms and advice centres that support asylum-seekers.
The state’s law and order-centred response to far-right pogroms in 2024 mirrors its responses to Cable Street. For several months in 1936, Jews experienced repeated street violence from Oswald Mosley’s fascists, culminating in Mosley’s threat to march thousands of Blackshirted fascists through the East End’s most heavily Jewish-populated streets on Sunday October 4.
Grassroots Labour members and trade unionists wanted to confront them, but Labour’s aloof hierarchy colluded with Tory and Liberal leaders to denounce plans for a counter-demonstration. From the relative comfort of the West End, the Jewish Board of Deputies made the same call.
Thankfully, many Jews completely ignored them, following the lead instead of the Jewish People’s Council against Fascism and Antisemitism (JPC), formed in the East End, and the Communist Party which had many local Jewish members. Trade unionists and Labour members, especially from the Labour League of Youth, joined the mass blockade at Gardiner’s Corner, and dockers from Irish Catholic families whom Mosley had tried to woo helped reinforce the barricades in Cable Street.
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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/cable-street-88-years-battling-fascists-then-and-now Many articles from the Morning Star today
