How the left betrayed the spirit of Cable Street

There’s chutzpah, and then there’s the left celebrating the Battle of Cable Street despite having spent the past three years knifing Britain’s Jews in the back. There’s gall, and then there’s liberals and leftists taking a break from marching shoulder to shoulder with Islamofascists to go all dewy-eyed over a Jewish uprising against Blackshirt fascists. There’s hubris, and then there’s the sickening sight of the same people who’ve been praying for the violent destruction of the Jewish nation now posing as champions of the Jewish bravery we saw on the streets of London 90 years ago this weekend.

We are about to witness something truly nauseating: the Jew-betraying left laying claim to the Jewish heroism of Cable Street in 1936. The lovers of intifada applauding a historic Jewish battle for freedom. A snivelling activist class that is only too happy to listen as Islamists call for the Army of Muhammad to come back and kill every Jew briefly pulling on the thin rags of ‘anti-fascism’ and saying ‘Hail Cable Street!’. Ready your sick bags.

It mustn’t stand. It is nothing less than an act of moral theft for the contemporary left to claim Cable Street as theirs. They are plundering the glorious history of British anti-fascism in search of a disguise they might wear to hide their own Jewphobia. They are demanding their moral pound of flesh from Cable Street in order that we might finally believe their great lie – that their myopic hatred for the world’s only Jewish state is anti-fascism, not fascism. That their celebration of the ‘resistance’ of 7 October was virtuous and righteous, not vicious and racist. That their wet dream of a world without a Jewish homeland is a continuation of the radicalism of Cable Street rather than an apocalyptic upending of it. It’s time to reclaim Cable Street from the deracinated remains of British leftism.

The Battle of Cable Street took place on Sunday 4 October 1936. Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists (BUF) announced their intention to march, in military formation, through the working-class districts of East London. That part of London was home then to vast numbers of Jews. Around a third of Britain’s Jews lived there. They included historic communities who had come back to England in the 1650s following Cromwell’s reversal of the 1290 Expulsion of the Jews, and also more recent arrivals from the Russian Empire, which in the late 1800s and early 1900s had been gripped by the fever of anti-Jewish pogroms. And as early as 1936 there were Jews in the East End who had freshly fled the creeping menace of Nazism in Europe.

Given both their historical and living memory of anti-Jewish animus, it wasn’t surprising the East End Jews did not take kindly to Mosley’s planned march. They considered it an intolerable intrusion into Jewish life, a spectacle of hate designed to let London’s Jews know that they would fare no better than Europe’s Jews. That they, too, would be subjected to the supremacist provocations of fascism. So the Jews had a choice: Let it happen, and accept they would suffer the slings and violence of anti-Semitic dehumanisation as they had done in Russia, Poland and Germany. Or stop it, and in doing so lay a moral flag in the dirt, one that would make it clear that here, in Britain, fascism would not enjoy free rein. Here, Jews would fight back against the fate authored for them by the racist machinery of Nazism.

They chose the latter. They chose freedom.

They rose up, assisted by others in the working class: Irish dock workers, anarchists, trade unionists. On 4 October, on Cable Street and beyond, this ragtag army of resistance faced down Mosley’s 5,000 Blackshirts. They borrowed the cry of Spanish republicans who were then embroiled in a bitter civil war with Francoist nationalists: ‘They shall not pass.’ They availed themselves of whatever makeshift weaponry they could find and hit the streets to say No. They let the world know that fascism would gain no foothold in East London, and by extension in England, and that in fact England might prove to be fascism’s gravedigger.

It was on 26 September 1936 that Mosley first announced his intention to march through East London. He chose the date of 4 October as a celebration of the fourth anniversary of the BUF’s founding. The official organisations of British leftism agitated for a ban on the march. The Labour Party and various mayors from East London delivered a petition to the Home Office pleading for it to block Mosley’s men. The Home Office refused. The Jews of East London became restless. They started to plan a counter-rally. That panicked the media classes and progressive organisations almost as much as the Blackshirt rally did. From the left-wing Daily Herald to the Jewish Chronicle, from the Labour Party to the Communist Party, the cry went out: Don’t counter-march. Don’t risk violent clashes. Don’t be hooligans.

The working class ignored the pleas of polite society and readied itself for a showdown with Hitler’s pal, Mosley. When it came, it was intense. Five thousand fascists vs thousands of anti-fascists. The people erected barricades on Cable Street. They used an upturned bus, tables, chairs and paving stones to block the fascist trudge. There was ferocious hand-to-hand combat. The rebels wielded stones, chair legs, rotten veg and even the contents of their chamber pots against both the Mosley militia and the Metropolitan Police who had been deployed to ferry the fascists through East London. Children were sent to roll marbles under the hooves of police horses. A whole community, armed with little more than fury and broken furniture, stood firm against fascism. Hundreds were injured, many arrested.

And they won. Mosley abandoned his plans and scurried back to Central London. So fascism could be pushed back. Toiling Jews from the textile industry and wind-beaten dockers from Ireland had just shown as much. Fascism remained a menace in England, of course: just two weeks after the Battle of Cable Street there was the Pogrom of Mile End, also in East London, when 200 Blackshirts smashed up Jewish shops. And fascism’s greatest crimes were yet to be committed in Europe. Yet the Battle of Cable Street spoke in all its glory and mayhem to the moral possibilities of anti-fascism.

The battle is rightly memorialised in British history. There’s a mural in the East End celebrating it. There have been numerous books written. There’s even a musical. To the left in particular, it’s the battle that confirms the searing power of the working class, the history-shaping impact the so-called lower orders can have when they come together and defy their ‘betters’. This weekend, the left will be out in force, certainly digitally, maybe even physically, to hail the heroes of Cable Street 90 years on. And I’m not going to have it. You shouldn’t, either.

It’s this simple: if you made excuses for the Nazi-like pogrom of 7 October, we don’t want to hear one word from you about British Jews’ fightback against fascism in 1936. If you have taken to the streets to scream for intifada, then kindly shut your mouths about the Mosleyite intifada that was mercifully thwarted by Jewish Londoners. If you have stayed schtum as Jews in 21st-century Britain have been stabbed, spat on and punched by anti-Semites calling them ‘Zio baby-killers’, and as their synagogues were firebombed and their schools threatened, then, please, say nothing about Cable Street. For not only do you no longer ‘own’ Cable Street – you have morally placed yourself on the same side as the Blackshirts who dreamt of invading Jewish London.

Consider some of the people bleating about the glories of Cable Street. There’s Socialist Worker, the paper of the Socialist Workers Party. It is organising a public event celebrating ‘the day we stopped fascism’. We? Is this the same Socialist Worker that said ‘Rejoice’ – rejoice – when more than a thousand Jews were put to death by Hamas? The same Socialist Worker that celebrated the rape and murder of Jews by those Islamofascists as an act of ‘resistance’? On the very day of Hamas’s anti-Semitic atrocities, Socialist Worker giddily cried that ‘the Palestinian people’ have the right to respond ‘in any way they choose’ to Israel’s ‘occupation’. Including by slitting Jewish civilians’ throats? And by raping and murdering Jewish women? And by shooting to death Jewish ravers? And by throwing hand grenades into bomb shelters in which terrified Jews had taken refuge? And by kidnapping Jewish toddlers and Jewish grandmothers and dragging them into the terrifying darkness of a dank, underground lair?

All of those things were unfolding as the scribes of Socialist Worker surrendered to onanistic blather about ‘resistance’. Imagine posing as ‘anti-fascist’ even as you make excuses for an army of anti-Semites that is objectively worse than the British Union of Fascists. For all his bigotry and wickedness, Mosley never beat to death a nine-month-old baby for the crime of being a Jew and then displayed his remains in front of a vast mural depicting the Jews as vampiric drinkers of blood. Hamas did. Those ‘resistance fighters’ did. Those Nazi Islamists who carried out the ‘revolt’ that so titillated the lowlife left did. Spare us the raised fists of left radicals who smirked when Jewish babies were slaughtered not three years ago.

To add insult to injury, the salt of Israelophobia to the wound of anti-Semitism, Socialist Worker’s Cable Street event is being held next Wednesday – the third anniversary of the 7 October pogrom. We face the very real, very horrifying prospect that at the same public meeting where the gilded left will celebrate Cable Street, it will also raise a glass to Hamas’s butchery of Jews. English literature’s most stinging satirists could not have dreamt up such a despicable scenario.

Then there’s Novara Media, the favoured outlet of gentrifying radicals. It frequently celebrates the Battle of Cable Street, when ‘thousands blocked the British Union of Fascists’, and it will do so again on the anniversary. Yes, this is the same Novara Media whose staff members called 7 October a ‘day of celebration’. Who said the ‘struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless’ as the fruit-pickers and printmakers of the Israeli kibbutzim were having their blood gleefully spilt by armed Islamofascists. Call me a stickler for moral decorum, but I believe that if you celebrated the mass murder of Jews just three years ago, then you should maintain a dignified silence about the Jews who heroically prevented such atrocities in 1930s Britain. You are not like those Jews. You are their moral opposite.

The radical outlet Counterfire is likewise prepping for celebrations of Cable Street, which it hails as the heroic moment when ‘thousands of working-class people came together, Jewish and non-Jewish, to stop Mosley’s Blackshirts’. This is the same Counterfire that was founded by leftists who have referred to Islamofascism as a form of democracy. Who said: ‘Democracy in the Middle East is Hamas, [it] is Hezbollah.’ Who even visited Beirut to take part in a conference at a Hezbollah-linked institution.

I can’t believe this needs to be said, yet it does. If you have said nice things about Hamas, a racist army that is constitutionally committed to the murder of Jews, or about Hezbollah, whose spiritual leaders called Jews the descendants of ‘apes and pigs’ who should be violently driven from the Holy Land, then you should keep the words ‘Cable Street’ out of your mouths. You don’t get to eulogise anti-Semites in the here and now and then gush over the anti-fascists of the 1930s. That goes for Jeremy Corbyn too, who will be wanging on about Cable Street and hoping we forget that he once called Hamas – a movement that encourages its followers to buy ‘five-shekel knives’ to ‘cut off the heads of Jews’ – his friends. Even lowlife Mosley’s racist traipse through East London pales into insignificance with the instruction from Jeremy Corbyn’s one-time ‘friends’ to slit the necks of Jews with cheap knives.

It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? And it goes for virtually the entire left. For three years, leftists have talked about nothing else but the supposedly demonic nature of the Jewish nation. They’ve rallied for the erasure of Israel all the way ‘from the river to the sea’. They’ve called supporters of Israel ‘Zios’ – the n-word of anti-Semitic discourse – and dreamt of their death. Zionists ‘don’t deserve to live’, they’ve said. Put them ‘in the ground’, they’ve cried. Liberals have forsworn brunch to spend their Saturdays marching with Islamists who called Hamas’s orgy of anti-Semitic violence a ‘moment of unparalleled joy and celebration’. They even hit the streets to chant for intifada on the very day two Jews were killed in an Islamist atrocity at Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester. Two dead Jews weren’t enough for them. They wanted more.

What an insult to history, not to mention the intelligence of Britons, that such people now think they can weep and cheer over the Battle of Cable Street. I’m here to tell them they can’t. The shamelessness is too great, the hubris too toxic.

Imagine if a clash like that at Cable Street were to occur today. Might Zack Polanski wonder out loud if the Jews of the East End are really unsafe or merely suffering from a ‘perception of unsafety’? Might they be accused of ‘weaponising anti-Semitism’ for political gain? Might they be instructed to stem their annoying ‘white tears’? Might the threatened invasion of their streets by fascist scum even be hailed as a ‘day of celebration’ or ‘a moment of unparalleled joy’? If the intruders in this imaginary 21st-century Cable Street were not white fascists like Mosley but brown-skinned haters of Israel with a keffiyeh covering their mugs, it’s likely that would indeed happen; it’s likely the left would not ‘stand against’ this taunting of British Jews but gush over it, cheer it, call it ‘resistance’.

What am I talking about – there have been 21st-century Cable Streets. We don’t need to hypothesise. In Amsterdam in 2024, Jewish fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv fought as hard as they could against Arab mobs who called them ‘cancer Jews’ and threw them into rivers and mocked them with jokes about Hitler’s gas. In London, Jews marched in their thousands against anti-Semitism and said the disproportionate, libel-fuelled hatred for the Jewish State is endangering Jewish people. In the US, Jews gathered to plead for an end to Hamas’s anti-Semitic violence, only to find themselves subjected to anti-Semitic violence. One elderly lady was doused with accelerant by a man hollering ‘Free Palestine’ and then set on fire. She died a few days later. They’re burning Jews to death again.

Which side did the left take in all this barbarism? It sided with the Islamofascist mob in Amsterdam. It damned the British marchers against anti-Semitism as ‘far right’. It turned a blind eye to the setting alight of American Jews, and the shooting to death of American Jews, and the mass murder of Australian Jews, and the slaughter of Mancunian Jews. If Mosley was non-white and wore a keffiyeh, they’d be falling at his rancid feet. Few stances illustrate the left’s moral demise as much as its unhinged loathing for the Jewish State and its stark failure of solidarity for the Jews of the West. The descent into anti-Semitism is always indicative of a deeper moral rot, a sign society is rejecting reason and fawning instead over superstition and tyranny. The journey from Cable Street to ‘globalise the intifada’ is proof of the left’s intoxication by this ancient cosmic bigotry.

I cycled down Cable Street a few days after the pogrom of 7 October in 2023. And from virtually every lamppost there fluttered the Palestine flag. Imagine that – the street where Britain’s Jews held back fascism was festooned with the flag under which more than a thousand Jews had just been slain by Islamofascism. Nothing has convinced me more that Britain is in deep moral trouble. Anti-fascism is a wondrous tradition, and one we need now more than ever. Those of us who have not abandoned our Jewish compatriots, and who do not dream of Israel’s apocalyptic erasure, should resuscitate it for the coming battle with the armies of Islamism and their left-wing simps.