The Fake Battle of Cable Street

On 'anti-Fascism' and the 'Far Right' then and now

The Battle of Cable Street looms large in the mythology of the British Left. On Sunday 4^th October 1936, a hundred thousand (or more) working-class men and women from the East End of London came out into the streets to repel an attempt by the antisemitic British Union of Fascists to march in their uniforms along Cable Street, through the area of London where the majority of the city’s Jews lived. As the story goes, the collective resistance of the working classes dealt such a blow to Fascism in Britain that it never recovered.

There is no more direct route to establishing one’s credentials in the class struggle than to claim that members of one’s family participated in the Battle of Cable Street. That’s one reason why, a few years ago, when running for the Labour Party leadership on a ‘hard-Left’ platform, Jeremy Corbyn asserted that his mother had been at Cable Street. He repeated this assertion after he was elected. It’s perfectly possible his mother was indeed there, but no evidence exists to support Corbyn’s claim regarding an event that took place many years before he was born.

This last year, the story of the victory over Fascism at Cable Street has repeatedly been invoked by left-wing commentators and campaigners in order to rouse the public to resist the supposed return of the Far Right to the streets of British cities. After it was reported that three young girls had been murdered, and eight others wounded, at a party in Southport in Lancashire on Monday 29^th July, and it was alleged on social media that the culprit was a Muslim asylum-seeker recently arrived in the country, anti-immigrant riots broke out on the streets of Southport and in other northern towns and cities. The police warned that a further hundred demonstrations were planned across the country for the evening of Wednesday 7^th August. Shops were boarded up in anticipation, and people sent home early from work. Thousands of riot police took to the streets, along with thousands of self-described ‘anti-racists.’ But the predicted protests never materialised. It was subsequently admitted that the story of a hundred planned demonstrations had been a hoax. Mainstream and left-wing media nonetheless reported the events of the evening as another victory for anti-Fascists over the Far Right. ‘The scenes of civil solidarity were reminiscent of the Battle of Cable Street,’ reported The Nation. ‘It’s not the first time the threat of far-right nationalism has been fended off by ordinary people who’ve mobilised to protect their communities.’

Since there were in fact no ‘far-right nationalists’ to be fended off on 7^th August, the events of that evening might reasonably be described as the ‘Fake Battle of Cable Street.’

But then the Battle of Cable Street itself is a myth. The working classes of the East End did not fight the Fascists. Many of those participating in the Fascist march were themselves working-class East Enders. Nor was the Battle of Cable Street a struggle between the Left and the Fascists. It was a battle with the police who were trying to clear a route for the Fascists to march along. The police were forced to abandon their efforts, and told the Fascists they would have to turn back.

The British Union of Fascists always made a point of following the instructions of the police. This enabled them to present the Battle of Cable Street as a victory for lawlessness over law and order, as the triumph of those who sought to suppress free speech over those who merely wanted to express their democratic right of protest. In the short term at least, the Battle of Cable Street was a propaganda victory for the Fascists.

Far from the events at Cable Street representing a decisive victory over Fascism, as is claimed today, they provided the British Union of Fascists with free publicity, which led to two thousand new members joining their organisation. The next weekend saw what has been described as a ‘pogrom’ in nearby Mile End in which the Fascists smashed up and looted many Jewish-owned shops, and threw a Jewish hairdresser and a young girl through a plate-glass window.

The Battle of Cable Street is famous today, but nobody remembers the Battle of Bermondsey, which replayed the events of Cable Street exactly one year later, in October 1937. The Bermondsey battle was, if anything, even more violent than the Cable Street one. But the mythology of Cable Street dictates that it marked a decisive victory for the Left over the Fascism, a notion would be undermined if reference were made to a similar event that occurred a year afterwards.  

Fascism in Britain was defeated, not by the Left at Cable Street, but by the Second World War. British Fascists made the mistake of supporting the Nazi regime in Germany, which destroyed their patriotic credentials when war broke out. In 1940 many of them were interned (under Regulation 18B) for showing sympathy with the country’s enemies.

The myth of the Battle of Cable Street was largely created by the British Communist Party, who subsequently sought to present themselves as the main organisers of the resistance. They wanted to exaggerate their role because they hadn’t been particularly active in fighting Fascism until then, and had originally organised a demonstration at Trafalgar Square in central London in support of the Republican cause in Spain for the day of the planned Fascist march along Cable Street. They were shamed by their local East End branch into cancelling their Trafalgar Square demonstration at the last minute in order to focus on the Fascist threat in the East End. (One might well be tempted to make a comparison with the current obsession on the Left with the Israeli-Palestinian issue rather than with the attack by our own government on our human rights and civil liberties here in Britain.)

The idea of a ‘Battle of Cable Street’ only became known to the general public as the result of a BBC TV documentary in 1970. There was no major commemoration before the 50^th anniversary in 1986, and this didn’t involve any Jewish organisations because it clashed with the celebration of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year). By that time there were virtually no Jews left living in the East End, anyway. They’d all moved out, to north and north-west London or to Essex. Which made it easier for political organisations on the Left to take ownership of the story of the Battle of Cable Street.

The famous Cable Street mural was also painted in the 1980s. It’s a masterpiece of street art, inspired by the social realism of Diego Rivera, well worth travelling to see. (It’s on the side of the local register office.) The mural doesn’t present an accurate picture of the crowd of half a century earlier, however, because it took as its models people who were living in the area at the time it was painted. There are relatively few recognisably Jewish faces in the mural.

On the anniversary of the battle in 2016, the historian and archivist Martin Sugarman, whose father and grandfather had both taken part eighty years earlier, told the Jewish Chronicle that it was time to reclaim the Battle of Cable Street as Jewish history. The Jewish contribution had been rendered invisible by the hard Left and Stalinists who had been running the commemorations, he said. As a result, the Jews had been squeezed out.

The core of the resistance to the Fascists at Cable Street came from Jews, supported by Irish dockers and railway workers. Many of the younger generation of East End Jews were also Communists – a fact which helped the Communist Party subsequently to claim ownership of the resistance – but they resisted the Fascists because they were Jews, and because the British Union of Fascists was virulently antisemitic.

It's often been suggested that many young working-class British Jews turned to Communism in the 1930s because they wanted to reject the Judaism of their parents. Well, if they wanted to get away from Jews by becoming Communists, going to meetings that were full of other Jews probably wasn’t the best way to do it. Many of the young British Jewish Communists came from families who had already been involved in radical politics back in the Russian Empire, and who saw no contradiction in combining Hebrew prayers with Soviet songs at their Passover seders.

Jews joined the Communist Party to fight antisemitism. They manned the barricades at Cable Street in defiance of a passive Jewish establishment who had told them that antisemitism was the fault of Jews for making themselves too conspicuous, and that if they stood up to the Fascists, they would just make things worse.

British Jews were well aware of the increasing persecution of German Jews by the Nazi regime, and were concerned, with good reason, that they might well be seeing the beginnings of something similar here in Britain, unless they took steps to put a stop to it.

It was because the Battle of Cable Street was fundamentally an act of Jewish resistance that Jeremy Corbyn was so keen to wrap himself in the mantle of his mother’s participation. Corbyn had been accused both of personal antisemitism and of failing to do enough to rid the Labour Party of antisemites. He sought to exonerate himself from these accusations by emphasising his family’s connection to Jewish resistance against Fascism.

The British Union of Fascists had not originally pursued a policy of antisemitism. A fundamental difference between German and Italian Fascism was that the political philosophy of the Nazi Party in Germany emerged out of antisemitism, whereas Benito Mussolini – the original Fascist – had a lot of Jewish supporters in the 1920s and early 1930s for his concept of a corporate state. Mussolini only turned to antisemitism in 1938, as a matter of political expediency, the price of his alliance with Nazi Germany. In the early 1930s, the British Union of Fascists followed the Italian rather than Germany model. They had some Jewish members, most conspicuously the famous Jewish East-End boxer Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis. They were accused by other, more antisemitic Fascists of being ‘Kosher Fascists.’

Like Mussolini, Oswald Mosley, the founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists, turned to antisemitism primarily for reasons of political expediency. His movement had stagnated by the mid-1930s, and blaming the Jews for all the ills of British society gave it a new burst of energy. Antisemitism was the norm in 1930s Britain, and nobody was going to damage themselves politically by adopting it as part of their platform.

Even the most celebrated public figures thought nothing of making what would now be regarded as the most outrageously antisemitic comments. In early 1936, for example, the playwright George Bernard Shaw told an American Jewish newspaper that ‘Those Jews who still want to be the chosen race can go to Palestine and stew in their own juice. The rest had better stop being Jews and start being human beings.’

This was as nothing compared with the views of one of the leaders of the British Union of Fascists, William Joyce (who became notorious during the Second World War for broadcasting pro-Nazi propaganda from Germany as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ and was the last person in the history of Britain to be executed for high treason, in 1946). At public meetings in 1936, Joyce referred to Jews as ‘crawling vermin,’ ‘Oriental sub-men,’ and ‘a type of sub-human creature.’

Another prominent British Fascist, Arnold Leese, who had refused to join the British Union of Fascists because they were insufficiently antisemitic for his taste (he coined the term ‘Kosher Fascists’), is best remembered today as the first person in the world publicly to advocate the extermination of the entire Jewish people in gas chambers, in 1935.

There must have been some sympathy among the general public for Leese’s opinions, because when he was prosecuted for ‘seditious libel’ for claiming that Jewish Passover celebrations included the sacrifice of Christian children, he was acquitted by a jury who appeared to regard him as a man of honest convictions.

In the days before the Battle of Cable Street, the slogan appeared on walls in the East End, ‘Kill the Jews.’

It's instructive to compare these views with those of the so-called ‘Far Right’ today, who represent, it is claimed, the contemporary manifestation of Fascism. The best-known ‘Far Right’ figure in the country is Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), currently serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court. For Saturday 26^th October 2024 Robinson organised a ‘Unite the Kingdom’ demonstration in central London which he promoted as a celebration of British culture and values, and as a protest against the imprisonment of people who had spoken out about the government’s immigration policy after the reported killing of three young girls in Southport in July. Robinson was not able to appear at the demonstration himself, because he had been arrested the previous day and detained in custody. He appeared only on a big screen as the presenter of a new documentary film ‘Lawfare’ in which he gave a voice to the concerns of this summer’s protestors about the sexual harassment and rape of young women by occupants of migrant hotels, and to claims of two-tier policing and a politicised judiciary.

Robinson’s event was attended by tens of thousands of people, including many (non-observant) British Jews. I might well have gone myself, had it not been held on the Sabbath. I had written to Robinson to suggest that he was missing a trick by arranging his event for a Saturday, which precluded observant Jews from attending. Robinson is well known to be a fierce critic of Muslims and Islam (which explains his arrest and imprisonment) and a strong supporter of Jews and of Israel. Indeed, his outspoken support for the Israeli state has led some of his critics to accuse him of being a Zionist agent.

In the weeks preceding Robinson’s event, trades unions and other left-wing organisations sought to drum up support for a counter-demonstration, in which they called upon their fellow travellers to ‘Stop Tommy Robinson’ and ‘Stop the Far Right,’ and to ‘unite against racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism.’ Without delving into the question of whether ‘Islamophobia’ actually exists – Islam being a religion rather than a race – I don’t think anyone would suggest that Robinson is well disposed towards Islam. But to accuse Robinson of antisemitism is patently the opposite of the truth. Maybe it can be explained by the concept of ‘intersectionality,’ which holds that, if someone criticises any racial minority, then he’s by definition a racist and an enemy of all minorities, whatever the actual truth of the matter. More likely, it's just gaslighting.

The counter-demonstration involved a march on which people chanted, ‘Tommy Robinson, we see you, you’re a Fascist, through and through,’ and a number of speeches. One of the main speakers was Jeremy Corbyn, who as a result of accusations of antisemitism had been compelled to resign the Labour Party leadership, had been expelled from the Party, and now sat in Parliament as an independent MP, a member of a new Independent Alliance with four independent Muslim ‘pro-Gaza’ MPs. In his speech, Corbyn declared that in opposing Tommy Robinson ‘We stand in the great traditions of those who met at Cable Street in 1936 to prevent the Nazis from marching in the East End.’

In today’s upside-down world, it is the so-called ‘Fascists’ on the ‘Far Right’ who speak up for Jews and Israel, and the so-called ‘anti-Fascists’ on the Left who are widely accused of antisemitism, principally on account of their hostility to Israel. It’s moot whether they’re actually antisemitic. I’m not someone who would necessarily equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism – indeed, I have spoken out publicly against making such an equation – but at the same time I’m well aware that a lot of antisemites try to hide their racism behind a smokescreen of ‘anti-Zionism;’ certainly many Muslims and Arabs make no distinction between ‘Israelis’ and ‘Jews’. While I’m happy to accept that most of those on the Left who campaign so enthusiastically in favour of the Palestinian cause, do not do so from a perspective of antisemitism, it is nonetheless the case that they single out Israel for a degree of attention and criticism they never or rarely direct towards other countries, and I can see how many Jews and especially Jewish Israelis would conclude that they are antisemitic.

While many, perhaps most of the people who take part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations – including lots of left-wing Jews – do so because they want a peaceful resolution to the conflict in the Middle East, some participants do chant hateful antisemitic slogans, and the organisers of the events, who claim they are only interested in the pursuit of peace and justice, say absolutely nothing to distance themselves from the hate-filled chanting and banners. We haven’t yet encountered in Britain the antisemitic violence that has started to break out in other countries, the consequence (it has been claimed) of the failure of the police to stamp down on non-violent expressions of antisemitic hatred.

The same point about the failings of the police had been made in the 1930s, except then the antisemitic hatred was coming from Fascists. In a parliamentary debate on antisemitism in July 1936, the west London MP Dennis Pritt argued that the laxity of the police had encouraged Fascists to make wild antisemitic claims such as the blood libel – the allegation that Passover celebrations included the sacrifice of Christian children, for which Arnold Leese stood trial – which (Pritt said) had preceded every pogrom in Russia and in Poland and, if the government failed to act, would inevitably led to pogroms in Britain.

There’s no question that a great many of the East End police sided with the Fascists. Some were members of the British Union of Fascists as well as of the police force. On occasion their partiality towards the Fascists was so blatant that the Home Secretary Sir John Simon felt obliged to send police officers into the East End from outside the area, known as ‘Simon’s Body Snatchers,’ to make arrests.

Many of the anti-Fascists who were arrested for their part in resisting the attempt by the police to clear a path for the Fascists to march along Cable Street, were beaten up in police custody. The best-known example was Charlie Goodman who was lifted up and his head used as a battering ram. They were also treated severely by the courts, and sent to prison for relatively minor offences.

The harsh treatment of anti-Fascist protestors by the police and courts in 1936 bears comparison not with their attitude towards so-called ‘anti-Fascists’ today but with the egregious prosecution and imprisonment of supposedly ‘Far Right’ protestors who took part in demonstrations in the summer of 2024 or merely wrote about them on social media. Far from the story of this summer’s protests being a replay of Fascist antisemitic agitation in the 1930s, and the left-wing counter-protests a resurgence of the anti-Fascist resistance of the Battle of Cable Street, the truth lies the other way round.

When the British Union of Fascists announced it had planned a march along Cable Street, a local grassroots Jewish group rapidly collected the best part of 100,000 signatures on a petition asking the Home Secretary to ban it. He refused to interfere, on the grounds that the government was not prepared to impinge upon the principle of freedom of speech. How very different from our current Home Secretary (and Prime Minister) who are only too keen to impinge upon free speech to prosecute and imprison people for speaking out against the preferential treatment given to illegal immigrants. It’s unlikely that judges would have imposed disproportionately long prison sentences on ‘keyboard warriors’ without direction from the government. These cautionary sentences were clearly intended to frighten anyone else, who might have been thinking of commenting adversely on the government’s immigration policy, into staying silent.

Tommy Robinson has suggested (in an interview with Alex Jones) that the police deliberately stoked the violence so that they would have an excuse to arrest rioters they had themselves incited, and in order that a compliant politicised judiciary might then have a pretext to throw the book at them. I wouldn’t be surprised.

Might the government have planned the entire sequence of events? Once the riots had started it showed no interest in addressing the underlying causes but only in punishing everyone who’d been associated with them, however peripherally. It declared that the young man who had been arrested for the Southport stabbings was a Welsh native, and prosecuted people who had claimed online that the perpetrator was a Muslim terrorist. The police persuaded those they had arrested to plead guilty by warning they would spend a long time on remand in custody if they pleaded innocent; as a result, in a legal system normally mired in long delays, only a few days passed between their arrest and imprisonment; and they were handed down long sentences nonetheless.

When Robinson returned to Britain to hold his ‘Unite the Kingdom’ demonstration, he was arrested on Friday 25^th October and charged with terrorism for refusing to provide the police with the PIN code to his mobile ‘phone, and remanded in custody, thus preventing him from attending his own event the following day. Three days later he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for having made a documentary film (‘Silenced’) that challenged a state-sanctioned story of racially motivated school bullying, in contravention of a court order. It’s hard to see Robinson as anything other than a political prisoner.

The day after it had ensured Robinson was safely behind bars, the government announced the addition of further charges against the suspect they had arrested for the Southport stabbings, including possession of Islamist terrorist materials – despite having previously prosecuted and imprisoned people who’d said this had been an act of Islamist terrorism.

One might have thought it the business of Parliament to debate the conduct of a government that had people imprisoned for saying something it later admitted might have been true, but MPs were forbidden from bringing it up. The Speaker of the House of Commons ruled that the topic could not be discussed because supposedly it might prejudice the forthcoming trial (not true). So no MP was able to ask the Prime Minister when he had known of the alleged Islamist connection (which would have been within days, if not hours of the arrest). There’s probably more to come out. I imagine further revelations are unlikely to show the government or Prime Minister in a favourable light.

Tommy Robinson has argued (in his ‘Lawfare’ documentary) that he and his supporters have been demonised as ‘Far Right’ in order to create an imaginary enemy to deflect from the government’s failures to take any steps to limit immigration from Muslim-majority countries and to deal with crimes committed by illegal immigrants.

I would go further than Robinson and posit that the authorities have created an imaginary enemy in the ‘Far Right’ in order to deflect the attention from the real enemy, which is the authorities themselves. It’s the same tactic as when they said four years ago that we were confronted with a deadly virus that threatened to kill us all. Surely the principal lesson of the COVID regime – lockdown, masks, testing, coerced vaccination – was that the weapons our government had previously turned on the inhabitants of foreign countries, it was now turning on its own citizens? The fundamental divide between the asleep (‘normies’) and the awake is that the former believe that the system is intended to serve the interests of citizens – and where it has failed it’s because of incompetence or corruption – whereas the latter are convinced that the system is their enemy and is intended to destroy them.

I have never seen a more blatantly Stalinist act by any British government than when this last summer it started to release dangerous criminals from prison early in their sentences to make room for protestors who had been handed down lengthy prison sentences for criticising its reckless promotion of uncontrolled mass immigration. Releasing violent criminals to make room for political prisoners was a favoured ploy of Joseph Stalin.

When, in 1936, the Home Secretary refused on grounds of free speech to ban the march by the British Union of Fascists along Cable Street, and the police were instructed to clear the way so that they could proceed, were they right to do so?

Were the Jews who stood in the way of the Fascists at Cable Street opponents of free speech and the right to protest, as the Home Secretary had suggested, and as Oswald Mosley had insisted? Were they actually in the wrong?

The Jewish establishment of the time certainly thought so. The Jewish Chronicle newspaper, and prominent British Jews, warned the Jews of the East End against trying to stop the Fascists from marching, saying it would only increase antisemitism. Jews who were convicted and imprisoned for their part in the Battle of Cable Street were told by Jewish prison visitors that they were ‘hooligans’ and ‘the kind of Jew who gives us a bad name. It is people like you who are causing all the aggravation to the Jewish people.’ 

The Jewish Chronicle had been saying for some time that those Jews who stood up to the Fascists were betraying Jewish principles. After a Fascist rally in London two years earlier, where stewards had savagely beaten-up Jewish hecklers, the Jewish Chronicle had – extraordinarily – condemned the Jews who’d come to disrupt the meeting rather than the Fascists who’d assaulted them, on the grounds that ‘Jews who interfere with the full expression of opinion are false to the Jewish teachings of justice and fair play and are traitors to the vital material interests of the Jewish people.’

The Jewish Chronicle’s understanding of Jewish teachings was incorrect.

Turning the other cheek may be a Christian value (Matthew 5:39-40), but it is not a Jewish one. If the Bible teaches us anything, it is that Jews are prepared to fight for their rights and their religion. I wrote about the history of Jewish resistance to oppression in my article ‘The Real Chanukah Story’ at the end of last year.

One of the fundamental values of Judaism is ‘Lo Ta’amod’ – Do Not Be a Bystander. This comes from Leviticus 19:16, ‘Neither shalt thou stand idly by the blood of thy neighbour.’ If your neighbour is threatened, if your neighbour is harmed, then you must stand by his side. Don’t leave it to others to fight on his behalf.

A few years after the Battle of Cable Street the principle of not being a bystander was reinforced by the Holocaust, when the Jewish leadership in Britain and America and other Allied countries did exactly what they were told not to do in the Bible and stood idly by the blood of their neighbours rather than making as much noise about what was happening as they possibly could and putting maximum pressure on their governments to do something about it.

When I set up my Jews for Justice campaign group in the autumn of 2021, to speak out from a Jewish perspective against the government’s assault on free speech, human rights and civil liberties, I chose the name for a reason. I was aware of potential confusion with other Jewish groups who had ‘Justice’ in their title, most of them concerned with campaigning for justice for the Palestinian cause. But it seemed to me that the founders of these groups must have been non-practising (or ‘secular’) Jews, as they’d all used the word ‘justice’ in its English sense, to mean the assertion of the rights of a particular group or interest in competition with the rights of another. In the case of Jews for Justice, I meant the word in its Jewish sense (in Hebrew, ‘Tzedek’), which is not about competing rights but about pursuing the path of righteousness and about following one’s conscience (or, if one is religious, G_d) wherever that might lead and whatever the consequences of so doing might be.

Many observant Jews took part in the Battle of Cable Street and they would perfectly well have understood the Jewish principles of ‘Lo Ta’amod’ and ‘Tzedek’ that underlay their participation.

That said, Jews who resisted the Fascists were standing up as much for British principles as for Jewish ones. The older generation of Jewish immigrants felt grateful to Britain for having offered them a place of refuge when they had fled persecution in the Russian Empire, and tended to shrink back from participation in political protest. Their British-born children, on the other hand, felt that as British citizens they had the right, indeed the duty to uphold the British principle of ‘fair play’ they had been taught at school, in order to confront a new set of would-be oppressors. That helps explain why so many of them joined the Communist Party, and so many held the line at Cable Street.

In contrast, it was the older rather than younger generation of Britons who came out on the streets this summer, and took part in Robinson’s demonstration this autumn, to protest their rights as British citizens being handed over to newly arrived immigrants from distant countries who share neither our culture nor our traditions, and who aren’t being told they need to learn to do so. As has been observed about those of us who have for the past few years been speaking out against lockdown and the COVID vaccines, and against the deliberate destruction of British traditions and their replacement with a new world of technocratic tyranny and upside-down racism, we are for the most part not young people but in our middle and late-middle age. The relative lack of young people in the freedom movement is partly to be explained by their reticence to challenge the system at the beginning of their working careers, but it’s also that they have no experience of living in an actual liberal democracy, in a country where the government genuinely reflects the opinions and values of its citizens.

The more ‘respectable’ elements of the freedom movement, and especially the leadership of the Reform Party – for whom (I think) most of the freedom movement voted in this summer’s general election – have gone out of their way to dissociate themselves from Tommy Robinson. I imagine that’s more because he’s the most widely vilified political figure in Britain, and therefore any association with him would tarnish their image, than because they disapprove of his political stance, which they largely share. Yet, unlike the current leadership of the Reform Party, most of whom were silent during COVID, Robinson spoke out against lockdown and coerced vaccination and vaccination passports. It’s irrelevant that Reform Party politicians are claiming now that they disapproved of the government’s COVID restrictions; all that matters is what they said (or didn’t say) at the time these were in force.

Robinson stood up for human rights and civil liberties and free speech and the right to protest at a time when mainstream politicians were scared to do so. How can Robinson (and, by implication, his supporters) be ‘Far Right’ or ‘Fascist’ when he (and they) stood up for democratic principles at a time when a supposedly Conservative government had entirely abandoned them? If Fascism meant anything in the 1920s and 1930s (and there were many arguments over what it did exactly mean), it referred to the conviction that democracy had failed and should be replaced by a new system which subordinated the rights of the individual to the authority of the state. Which is exactly the position that people who nowadays describe themselves as ‘anti-Fascists’ took during COVID when they not only supported all the repressive measures imposed by the government, but protested that the restrictions were not repressive enough.

For the so-called ‘anti-Fascist’ Left to have invoked the history of the Battle of Cable Street in order to condemn as ‘Far Right’ those people who have insisted on upholding their democratic rights of protest and free speech to oppose the harmful consequences of open borders and uncontrolled immigration, can only be described as an abuse of history, and the opposite of the truth.