Battle of Cable Street: 90th anniversary

Debate between Apsana Begum and Jim Shannon

Monday 14th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Apsana Begum (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

It is an honour to lead this Adjournment debate. Let me say at the start that another colleague wants to speak, and I will take two very short interventions from Members I have had conversations with before the debate.

Next month, on 4 October, thousands of people from east London will be marking the 90th anniversary of what is commonly known as the battle of Cable Street, when the Jewish community and allies stood together to march off Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts. The victory is held up today as a high water mark for so many causes, including anti-fascism, grassroots Jewish activism and cross-community solidarity. It echoes from 1936 to the present in so many ways.

Antisemitism and hate crimes are again on the rise in Britain. Just last week, a man was charged after making a Nazi salute outside a synagogue. Of course, we must never forget the victims of the recent antisemitic attacks in north London—including the stabbings in Golders Green earlier this year—and the abhorrent Heaton Park terrorist attack a year ago, which took the lives of Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby. We are also seeing the return of far-right and racist agitators who seek, much like Mosely, to exploit the struggles of working-class people in this country and sow hatred, intolerance and division.

In the UK, migrants and asylum seekers are a sharp target. The anti-migrant pogroms in Belfast were just one among many chilling incidents of racist violence in recent months.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Lady on securing the debate. It is indeed important that we remember this occasion: 90 years ago, a fascist march was prevented from passing through Cable Street in London.

Northern Ireland has been especially afflicted by deep divisions running through our community, and the Peaceplus action plan has tried to address those issues. Does the hon. Lady agree that expanding and supporting cross-community initiatives across the UK and Northern Ireland can help strengthen relationships between communities? Remembering such events help us to do just that.

[Apsana Begum]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct that communities must work with one another to deal with the challenges of our time—particularly the rise of racism and fascism, which we see across the world.

Far-right parties are winning elections across western Europe, so we must look seriously and carefully at our own history and how we overcame those challenges in the past. Fascism was not defeated in Britain in a single day, but no day contributed as much as 4 October 1936. I am pleased that the Minister, a fellow London MP, is here, along with my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Stepney (Rushanara Ali), in whose constituency Cable Street is now situated after the boundary changes in 2024. We are here to debate the 90th anniversary and understand how the battle came to be.

By 1934, the British Union of Fascists was concentrating its efforts on building a menacing street movement in inner-city areas. In east London, the BUF had four large branches. Thousands of supporters were based in a diverse and economically struggling area, where the largest minorities were of Irish Catholic and east European Jewish heritage. About 100,000 Jews lived in east London, where shop signs were written in Yiddish and more than 100 synagogues and shtiebels were established. Fascists attempted to set Irish Catholic and Jewish communities against each other, accusing Jews of taking English jobs, smashing their market stalls and attacking and beating Jews returning from synagogue or from shopping.

On 26 September 1936, Mosley announced his intention to march provocatively right through those Jewish neighbourhoods and hold rallies with his supporters, but within two days 100,000 signatures were collected by the Jewish People’s Council—a local grassroots campaign formed only that year—to petition the then Home Secretary for a ban on the march to

“retain peaceable and amicable relations between all sections of East London’s population.”

Local mayors and local MPs including one of my predecessors, the great Labour MP George Lansbury, handed in the petition, yet shockingly the then Home Secretary refused and instead decided to send 7,000 police officers to protect Mosley and the blackshirts. Just hours after the refusal was issued, the Jewish People’s Council began to distribute leaflets calling on citizens of London to make sure the fascist march would not take place.

Far from being a spontaneous uprising, it took an extraordinary amount of effort to organise east London’s resistance. The Jewish People’s Council worked frantically to mobilise Jewish and non-Jewish communities locally, while Communist party, Independent Labour party and trade union branches all mobilised the area’s textile workers, dockers and railway workers.