When workers beat the fascists: how the left fought the antisemites at Cable Street
IN OCTOBER 1936, the workers of East London stopped police-protected fascists marching through the
Jewish areas of the East End. The Battle of Cable Street was an epic, and is now a myth-enshrouded
event in British working-class history. The far right is on the rise in many countries. The fight against fascism may once more become a matter of life and death to the labour movement. What lessons for this work can we learn from the anti-fascist struggle in East London? Did ‘objective conditions’ and, after 1934, Establishment disapproval kill off Mosleyism, or was it direct action on the streets?