Cable Street’s historical lessons are we must unite today's struggles into one

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THIS weekend, thousands will march in London’s East End commemorating the victory over Oswald Mosley’s fascists at the Battle of Cable Street 90 years ago.

This is no mere memorial. The far right is again on the rise.

Masked, black-clad thugs have paraded in Portsmouth and Dover, menacing immigrants and emergency service workers.

Their racist narrative is amplified, in Parliament, by Reform and Restore MPs, the former party vying for first place in polls — a level of support Mosley never approached. Nigel Farage’s invectives against the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, his wail of “two-tier justice” when a man is held in custody for allegedly knifing an inflatable dinghy with a rescue worker on board, show there is a connection between the far right’s “respectable” Westminster face and the brutes on the street.

Mosley had close ties to fascist dictatorships in Italy and Germany, and was lavishly funded by both. The Battle of Cable Street took place against the backdrop of the titanic struggle between fascism and democracy in Spain. The British government pursued a policy of appeasing an expansionist Nazi Germany, with powerful ruling-class circles hoping to direct its aggression eastwards against the Soviet Union. Part of it, exemplified by the “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” Daily Mail, was explicitly pro-fascist.

Today Reform is also under the spotlight for the huge donations it receives from shadowy figures based abroad. The extremist US tycoon Elon Musk backs the far right with his social-media empire.

The US government itself, in its publicly available National Security Strategy, talks of its support for far-right causes in Europe and is globally aggressive, launching a criminal war on Iran, facilitating genocide against the Palestinians and inflicting an illegal and crippling siege on the people of Cuba.

And the British government is, like that of the 1930s, guilty of appeasement, even allowing the US to use British bases to bomb Iran.

Parallels are never exact, but there are enough that we should look to Cable Street for pointers on how to fight the far right today.

First, the Jews, communists and socialists who rallied at Cable Street took a stand. They were not prepared to let the Blackshirts terrorise them. They took to the streets to stop them — and they did so at many other battles across Britain.

Second, this was a community uniting against the fascist threat. Work went into uniting that community over weeks, months and years. These people were defending their own streets, like the residents of Garvaghy Road last month or the mass rallies of the summer of 2024. It was not a case of activism from outside.

Third, physically stopping the fascists was not seen as “job done.” Work continued to turn people away from fascism, through showing that the left, not the right, was prepared to organise against slum landlords and exploitative employers.

British democracy was being defended against fascism, but those on the front line never pretended British democracy was working for ordinary people. Maximum unity against fascism was combined with radical opposition to the status quo and practical work to help working-class people fight the system for better working and living conditions.

And the world picture was never far away. Those same editions of the Morning Star’s forerunner the Daily Worker that helped mobilise the East End against Mosley carried reports on Chamberlain’s appeasement, on the Nazi menace, on building solidarity with the Spanish republic.

Those “workerist” voices saying activism in defence of Cuba, for justice for Palestine or to end British support for war on Iran is a distraction from the home front are not learning from history.

Work needs to be done on building a left rooted in local communities, recognisably of and for the working class. That does not mean abandoning revolutionary and anti-imperialist radicalism but demonstrating through our day-to-day work that our struggles are one.

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