Battle of Cable Street remembered

NCP leader Andy Brooks with comrades at Cable Street

By New Worker correspondent

LONDON comrades joined communists from Greece and Italy at the Cable Street mural on Sunday 4th October to commemorate the 79th anniversary of the East End battle that stopped the fascists in their tracks in 1936.

Hundreds of thousands of anti-fascists took to the streets of London's East End on Sunday 4^th October 1936 to stop Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts marching through a predominantly Jewish part of East London.

On the day some 3,000 Blackshirts and thousands of police were met by a hostile crowd who had erected barricades to stop the fascists marching. After hours of clashes with the police and many arrests the police told Mosley the march would have to be abandoned.

The Communist Party played a major part in the mobilisation along with the Independent Labour Party, the Jewish Ex-Servicemen's Association and local people including many from the Jewish and Irish communities.

Last Sunday, by the famous mural that immortalises the East Enders’ heroic stand against fascism, New Communist Party members remembered all the anti-fascist fighters who fought for a better world, alongside comrades from the Italian Communist Party’s British Pietro Secchia branch and the Greek communist KKE branch in London.

The mural was started in 1979 and finally completed in 1983. The work, by a group of local artists, has been vandalised by neo-nazis a number of times over the years and was last restored in 2011. The design was based on original photographs of the battle and the buildings of the day. Some of the people who took part in the street fighting are depicted in the mural along with others who symbolise the people of the East End today.

The Italian communists, who organised the event, called on people to fight fascism and capitalism by raising up their proletarian flag whilst organising themselves in condemning any fascist or imperialist act of violence around the world.