Hidden London: The Real Battle of Cable Street
yewtu.be
The magnificent mural in Cable Street in East London, depicts the 1936 battle of Cable Street, when East end residents stopped Oswald Mosley and his fascist followers marching through their streets. In this powerful dissection of what happened, the real battle we learn was three way, between the police, the fascists and local people. Interwoven with eye witness testimony from Bill Fishman, Alan Hudson provides a riveting account of the events, the context and many hidden truths. The official labour movement tried to stop the anti-fascist protests and organised an alternative rally in Trafalgar Square. Lessons for today come thick and fast and we are left to contemplate the mural's contemporary meaning. It may only strike a cord locally Alan explains if we support today's migrant population and oppose all immigration controls.

The context for this was that Oswald Mosley formed a party called the British Union of Fascists in 1932. By 1936 he was having a hard time, he wasn’t doing as well as he thought [that] he was going to do, so Mosley had hit a roadblock, he was making no progress. He decided that one way of breaking through electorally was to galvanize anti‐foreign sentiment, anti‐Jewish sentiment, anything against the other, and the place to do that was the East End of London, which had brought everybody together.

The East End of London was always the melting pot of British society, and he could specifically target the Jewish population of the East End of London. So he decided, after a campaign of about nine months in which he was using his thugs to intimidate people, to smash windows, to come down here and say, ‘We can do this, look, we are going to take on the foreigner in British society!’ What happened?

Mosley, dilettante that he was, turned up late—he apparently was on his way to a wedding in [the Third Reich], his own wedding, presided over by Joseph Goebbels, and he decided that things weren’t going to plan. Local Labour dignitaries decided that things were getting too fraught and negotiated with the head, the commissioner of the police. Somebody called Commissioner Games [sic], and they decided to point the fascists in the other direction. So instead of trying to get into the East End, they marched away along the embankment.

Other events that happened today (October 4):

1881: Walther Heinrich Alfred Hermann von Brauchitsch, Axis field marshal and the Wehrmacht’s Commander‐in‐Chief, decided that life wasn’t shitty enough for us, so he had to come along.
1892: Engelbert Dollfuß, Austrofascist Federal Chancellor, plagued the earth.
1903: Ernst Kaltenbrunner, lawyer, general, and the Reich Security Main Office’s director, arrived so that he could embarrass the human race.
1976: Francis Joseph Collin sent out letters to the park districts of the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, requesting permits for the NSPA to hold a white power demonstration.
1997: Otto Ernst Remer, a Wehrmacht officer who was partially responsible for German neofascism, dropped dead.
2009: Günther Rall, Wehrmacht major and Luftwaffe aviator, expired.