Cable Street 1936: When workers drove back the fascists

Cable Street 1936:

When workers drove back the fascists

THE SUCCESS of the British National Party (BNP) in winning seats in
May’s local council elections in Barking and Dagenham in East London and
elsewhere poses the question of how the menace of the far-right can be
defeated. PETE DICKENSON looks at the lessons of the events known as the
Battle of Cable Street 70 years ago.

IN THE 1930s when Hitler was on the rampage in Germany destroying
working-class organisations, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) were
mobilising here to try to repeat his victories. They targeted Stepney in
London’s east end in their campaign because it was the centre of the
Jewish immigrant community.

The British fascists planned to divide local Jewish and non-Jewish
workers by whipping up racism and then establishing a power base in the
East End as a first step on their road to power. As a deliberate
provocation, the fascists organised a march through the most densely
populated immigrant areas of Stepney on 4 October 1936. The subsequent
‘Battle of Cable Street’ has many lessons on how to beat the far-right
today.

Mass unemployment

To understand what happened at Cable Street, we need to look at the
wider economic and political situation at the time. In 1929, a major
world financial crisis led to economic collapse in the leading
capitalist countries, causing mass unemployment and poverty for tens of
millions.

Germany was particularly hard hit. As a result the workers, acting
through their powerful political parties and trade unions, fought back
and threatened the rule of the bosses. In response many leading
capitalist firms gave money to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, which wanted
to physically destroy all organised opposition from the working class in
German society.

Due to the huge errors of the leaders of the main left-wing parties,
the Social Democrats and Communists, Hitler was able to come to power
and, tragically, to put his programme into effect.

In 1932 in Britain, Oswald Mosley tried to copy Hitler’s successes by
setting up the British Union of Fascists (BUF), whose members became
known as the Blackshirts. Initially, many establishment organisations,
including the Daily Mail and big firms such as ICI and Courtaulds,
backed him. But when Hitler seized power they pulled back as they began
to realise that an aggressive Germany threatened British capitalism’s
interests.

Mosley then tried to whip up support with a directly racist campaign,
and chose the Jews of Stepney as his target. Then as now, there was
great deprivation and poverty in the area and the local working-class
population was divided between Jews, who worked mainly in the rag trade,
and dockers of Irish origin. The BUF calculated that resentments between
the different groups, fostered by the conditions they faced, could
easily be exploited by scapegoating the Jews, as Hitler had done.

Mosley was well-financed from upper-class circles and threw
significant resources into his East End campaign. This resulted in the
BUF establishing a small base of support from some backward-looking
workers, with a headquarters in Duckett Street Stepney, which led to a
huge increase in racist attacks and the area being covered in fascist
slogans.

Their propaganda was virulently racist and anti-semitic, as bad as
the Nazis’; for instance one of their leaders, William Joyce, wrote at
the time that, "Jews….are an incredible species of sub-humanity" and
that "we pledge ourselves to get rid of the Jews". These are some of
their more moderate pronouncements, others are too disgusting to print.
(Joyce finished his career at the wrong end of a hangman’s rope after he
became a leading propagandist for the Nazi regime in world war two).

Confrontation

The local community mobilised to physically confront what it saw,
correctly, as a mortal threat to its existence. They were led mainly by
the Stepney Communist Party and the Young Communist League, who were
disregarding their party’s policy of ‘popular frontism’, which allowed
their policies to be dictated by ‘respectable’ capitalist opponents of
fascism.

According to police records, 60% of BUF meetings in 1936 were
disrupted by anti-fascist demonstrators, with the YCL in particular
organising audacious actions and propaganda stunts as part of the
campaign.

At the same time, the local Communist Party built support for direct
action by tenants against super-exploitation by local landlords. This
gave them a broad base of support that proved important in the
anti-fascist struggle. Most leaders of the trade unions, the Labour
Party and the official Jewish organisations, advised that it was best
not to get involved in the fight against the BUF, and to leave it to the
police to maintain law and order.

Mosley called for a major march through Stepney on 4 October 1936,
with the aim of establishing control of the streets. The choice of date
was not accidental. It coincided with historic events in Spain, where
Franco’s fascist troops had launched an assault on the capital Madrid,
in which the workers were mounting a heroic resistance with the slogan
No pasaran!

Mosley expected Madrid to fall to Franco soon, so the success of his
march would reinforce the apparent unstoppable advance of fascist
reaction on a European scale. Who would prevail – the organised working
class or future Hitlerite barbarism? Workers of Stepney understood this
question and mobilised accordingly to preserve their very existence,
unlike the Labour and trade union leaders who advised their members to
stay away.

Unity is strength

ON THE day, 250,000 thronged the area, blocking all the entrances to
the East End. They used the slogan of the defenders of Madrid: They
shall not pass! … no pasaran! 6,000 police were on duty, plus the
whole of the mounted division, and for the first time a helicopter was
used for crowd control. The police repeatedly tried to force a way
through the blocked roads, particularly Cable Street and were thwarted
on each occasion.

Running battles developed, with the police, heavily outnumbered,
being forced to ‘surrender’ to the demonstrators and hand over their
truncheons. At 3pm Mosley arrived in his open top Rolls-Royce, expecting
to drive triumphantly through the newly ‘occupied’ areas, but instead he
was met with a hail of bricks and missiles, that broke his car’s window.

The bricks came not only from Jews in Cable Street but also from
Irish workers on the barricade in Dock St to the south of the fascist
assembly point. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner was forced to
apologise to Mosley that it was impossible for the BUF to march and he
would have to lead his motley band back the way it had come. Mosley’s
dream of ever being Britain’s Hitler had been effectively destroyed. A
great victory had been won – they had not passed.

There are many lessons to be learnt from the events in Cable Street
70 years ago. A key issue is the importance of building broad support in
the community, not only through anti-racist work but through other
consistent campaigning activity that addresses the problems working
people face.

In this way, unity in struggle can be built between different
sections potentially divided by race or national differences. It is
important to emphasise the common interests and unity of all workers
fighting against a common enemy.

The organised working class led the Cable Street action, but during
the struggle it brought behind its banner on the day many other sections
of society, religious leaders, liberals and others. Support from all
these was welcome, but experience showed that if these groups were
allowed to influence the campaign’s programme, it led to disaster, as
was the case in the anti-fascist struggle in Spain.

Today, the far-right BNP pose a threat to Black and Asian people and
workers, and this will unfortunately increase as economic and political
crises develop in the coming years. In the early 1990s Militant Labour
in Tower Hamlets (the Socialist Party’s forerunner) emulated the work of
the Stepney CP and the YCL in the 1930s. They played a key role in
driving the racist BNP permanently from their provocative paper sale in
Brick Lane in the heart of Tower Hamlets’ Bangladeshi community.

This showed the way to effectively organise against the far-right.
The defeat of their ‘paper sale’ was a factor in convincing the BNP that
trying to win ‘control of the streets’ was no longer a viable policy. In
the future, many lessons of the victory at Cable Street and the 1990s
campaign against the BNP will again need to be learned to challenge the
far-right menace.


Protest at neo-Nazi Griffin

NICK GRIFFIN, neo-nazi leader of the far-right, racist British
National Party (BNP) is back in court in Leeds on 30 October. He faces a
re-trial on charges of inciting racial hatred after an undercover TV
documentary exposed Griffin and other BNP leaders saying what they
really think about Muslims, asylum seekers and immigrants, rather than
the more respectable image they now portray when trying to con people
into voting for them.

When Griffin was first in court last November, 1,000 protesters
outnumbered the BNP’s national mobilisation of 100! We must ensure that
trade unionists, students and young people once again show that the BNP
are not welcome in our communities.

However, the BNP are helped in spreading their divisive message by
the mass media who run scapegoating scare stories, and by mainstream
political parties including New Labour, who compete with each other as
to who can be toughest on asylum seekers and immigrants whilst cutting
and privatising our NHS, education and pensions!

It is capitalism world-wide, through war, dictatorships and poverty
that creates refugees and migrants, and it’s the bosses in Britain who
abuse cheap labour whilst exploiting divisions to keep all workers down.

The Socialist Party and Socialist Students call for a trade union-led
campaign for decent jobs and wages, homes and services for all, and for
the building of a new mass workers’ party to provide a socialist
alternative to the three main pro-war, pro-capitalist parties.

Protest against BNP leader Nick Griffin Monday 30 October, from 8am
onwards

Outside Leeds Crown Court, Oxford Row (near Town Hall).