Cable Street at 90: Solidarity Over Memory

The Battle of Cable Street: What Really Happened in 1936

On 4 October 1936, Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists attempted to march through the heart of London's East End. What greeted them was not a ceremonial counter-protest or a polite gathering of the like-minded. It was a wall of human resistance that had no business existing — not by the logic of sectarian politics, not by the fractures of class and ethnicity that divided those streets every other day of the year.

The coalition that assembled along the Battle of Cable Street that autumn afternoon remains one of the most remarkable demonstrations of cross-community solidarity in modern British history. Jewish residents who had fled pogroms in Eastern Europe stood alongside Irish dockers from the docks of Wapping. Somali seamen, trade unionists, independent socialists, and members of the Communist Party of Great Britain — people whose politics, faiths, and ancestral grievances had little in common — collectively barricaded their streets with overturned lorries and builders' rubble. The slogan "No pasarán" — they shall not pass — rang out simultaneously in Spanish, Yiddish, and English, a phrase borrowed from the antifascist resistance in Spain, where a civil war was already tearing the continent's conscience apart.

Mosley's Blackshirts never made it through. The Metropolitan Police, who had initially tried to clear the barricades on the fascists' behalf, eventually redirected the march away from the East End entirely. The battle lasted hours. Hundreds were arrested. Dozens were injured. But the march did not pass.

Solidarity, Not Memory, Was the Weapon That Won

Ninety years of commemorations have done something curious to Cable Street: they have turned a political act into a heritage moment. The mural on Whitechapel's Cable Street itself — restored several times since its creation, most recently with community fundraising — is beautiful. The oral history projects are vital. The museum exhibitions are worth visiting. None of this is the point.

What stopped the Blackshirts was not history consciousness. It was the decision, taken by tens of thousands of ordinary people, to treat someone else's threat as their own. The Irish dockers had no particular reason to stand for the Jewish community's safety. The Somali seamen owed the trade unionists nothing. The communists and the independent socialists disagreed about almost everything except the immediate, material question in front of them: do we let the fascists march or do we not?

Sarah Sackman, the Labour MP for Finchley and Golders Green, carries this history in her own bloodline. Her Spanish grandmother lived through the horrors of the civil war from which "No pasarán" emerged. Her Jewish paternal grandparents were among those East End residents whose streets were under threat. When Sackman describes that slogan as striking "at the core of my identity," she is not performing sentiment. She is articulating something that many descendants of that generation understand viscerally: solidarity is not an abstraction. It is the only thing that has ever actually worked.

Why the Cable Street Lesson Feels Urgent Ninety Years Later

The anniversary falls in a political climate that would have been grimly recognisable to the East Enders of 1936. Across Europe, far-right and nationalist parties have made significant electoral advances throughout the 2020s. In the United Kingdom, Hope Not Hate's annual State of Hate reports have consistently documented rising levels of far-right activity, growing online radicalisation infrastructure, and an expanding ecosystem of groups targeting ethnic and religious minorities. Home Office hate crime statistics have recorded year-on-year increases in offences targeting Jewish, Muslim, and Black communities across England and Wales — trends that predate any single political event and reflect something structural in how sectarian hostility is being cultivated and expressed.

This is not the Europe of 1936. But the mechanisms are recognisable. Scapegoating economic insecurity as the fault of minorities. Using the language of security to narrow the definition of who belongs. Exploiting genuine public anxieties about immigration, crime, or economic precarity to build political coalitions around exclusion rather than solidarity. The content changes; the architecture does not.

Sectarianism as the Enemy of Progress

Here is what sectarianism actually does: it converts potential allies into competitors and makes the most vulnerable communities fight each other for the smallest slices of political recognition. When communities are encouraged to see their safety as a zero-sum competition — Jewish security against Muslim security, workers' wages against migrant workers' rights — they exhaust their energy on each other rather than on the forces structuring that competition.

The Battle of Cable Street was a refutation of exactly this logic. The people who built those barricades did not agree about theology, land rights, wages, or Ireland. What they shared was a judgment that allowing the fascists to march would make everyone's situation worse. That judgment was correct, and it was possible only because the coalitions involved were willing to subordinate secondary disagreements to a primary threat.

Sectarian forces — whether they operate in the street, on social media, or within political parties — understand this dynamic perfectly well. Dividing communities is not incidental to their strategy. It is the strategy. Every successful episode of far-right organising in modern history has begun with identifying existing tensions between communities and deepening them. Cable Street succeeded in part because enough people recognised the game being played.

Rebuilding Coalitions: Security, Fairness, and Tolerance

The antifascist tradition has never been purely defensive. The same coalitions that stopped the Blackshirts in 1936 were also building trade unions, pushing for housing rights, and organising mutual aid in some of the most economically deprived communities in Britain. The Battle of Cable Street happened in the context of a broader political project that connected personal safety to material security, and material security to the capacity for solidarity.

Rebuilding that kind of coalition today requires naming what the shared interests actually are. Security — not just physical security from hate crime, but economic security from poverty, housing insecurity, and wage stagnation. Fairness — in how the legal system treats people, in how public services are resourced, in how opportunity is distributed. Tolerance — not as a passive attitude of non-interference, but as an active commitment to building civic institutions that allow diverse communities to coexist and flourish.

These are not anodyne values. They are demands with real political stakes. They name enemies — not in the sense of ethnic or religious others, but in the sense of the political and economic interests that benefit from division, from insecurity, and from the erosion of the institutions that protect working people.

No Pasaran: Reclaiming the Rallying Cry for Today

"No pasarán" is a slogan for a specific moment — the moment when the march is announced, when the barricade must be built, when the choice cannot be deferred. But the slogan's power in 1936 was not magical. It did not summon solidarity out of nothing. The solidarity already existed in the streets, the docks, the union halls, and the community organisations of the East End. The slogan named it and concentrated it at a point of crisis.

The lesson for the ninetieth anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street is not simply that we should remember what happened. Commemoration without political renewal is a monument, not a movement. The real lesson is structural: cross-community solidarity of the kind that stopped Mosley's march does not appear spontaneously when the crisis arrives. It is built, painstakingly, in the years before the crisis — through the work of organising, of showing up for each other, of treating other communities' vulnerabilities as one's own.

The East Enders who blocked those streets in October 1936 did not save themselves through memory. They saved themselves through solidarity. That distinction matters now as much as it did then. Ninety years on, the challenge is not to remember Cable Street. It is to be worthy of it.

Source: Opinion | The Guardian