Battle of Cable Street - 80th Anniversity of "East London Routs The Fascists"

On Tuesday 4 October 2016 it is the 80th anniversary of the 1936 "Battle of Cable Street" when anti-
fascists stopped a march through the (then) largely Jewish East End of London by Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists.

I have worked in Tower Hamlets for nearly 25 years. My first trade union branch secretary was the daughter of Phil Piratin, one of the chief Cable Street anti-fascist organisers (and later elected as a "Red Stepney" Communist MP).

There is a march and rally next Sunday 9 October 2016 (see below). Max Levitas, who is an original Cable Street veteran, and I have heard speak a number of times (and has joined our West Ham Labour Party street stalls in recent years) will be a speaker.

"Sunday, 9th October

 Assemble 12 noon @ Altab Ali Park, Whitechapel Road, London E1.
March to a rally @ St George’s Gardens, Cable Street. Speakers before and after the march include: Max Levitas (Cable Street veteran), Jeremy Corbyn MP, Rushanara Ali MP, Frances O’Grady (General Secretary, TUC), Unmesh Desai (GLA member, City and East London)

Speakers confirmed to date: Max Levitas (Cable Street veteran), Jeremy Corbyn MP, Rushanara Ali MP, Frances O’Grady (General Secretary, TUC), John Biggs (Mayor of Tower Hamlets), Unmesh Desai (GLA member, City and East London), Michael Rosen, Gerry Gable (Searchlight Research Associates), Weyman Bennett (Unite Against Fascism), Manus O’Riordan (Ireland IBMT), Glyn Robbins (United East End), Julia Bard (Jewish Socialists’ Group), Roger Mackenzie (UNISON) Alex Kenny (East London NUT), Shahriar Bin Ali (Bangladesh Workers Council, Amelia Womack (Green Party), Matt Wrack (FBU), Mick Cash (RMT), Sarah Sackman (Jewish Labour Movement), Tony Donaghey (Connolly Association), Mary Davis (new Stoke Newington synagogue), Leon Silver (East London Central Synagogue), Richard Humm (Cable Street Group)

Chairs: (Altab Ali Park) David Rosenberg, JSG; (St George’s Gardens) Megan Dobney, SERTUC

Plus marching bands including the Great Yiddish Parade and Udichi
Bring family, friends, work colleagues, neighbours! Bring Banners!"

On Wednesday 5 October 2016 at 6.30pm, Labour GLA Member, Unmesh Desai, will be joining other speakers at the Trinity Centre in East Ham to talk about "Battle of Cable Street: Lessons for present struggles"(organised by East End Together)

Jean Geldart from Hope Not Hate - UKIP is a Far Right Party of Race Hatred

Today was the UNISON Greater London Regional Council meeting. Hope Not Hate Trade union organiser,  Jean Geldart was a guest speaker.

Before she retired from Tower Hamlets Council, Jean was my  Branch Secretary and a senior UNISON NEC member. She is also the daughter of Phil Piratin who was the Communist Party MP for Stepney 1945-1950.

Jean described how appalling and openly corrupt many of the UKIP MEPs and Councillors are. While many of them are good for a laugh, the leaflets UKIP have put out are worse than even the fascist BNP!

They have organisers who use to work for the National Front and see nothing wrong with this.

The recent shambles in the European Parliament has seen them form an alliance in order to gain EU funding of £1 million (from us tax payers) with Polish anti-Semitic racists and Holocaust deniers.

While they are not  a serious threat in most of London at the moment we have to be vigilant. UKIP can be defeated. In May 2014 when there was local election as well as Euro elections, voters tended to vote UKIP for the EU since they did not think it was important and mainstream parties for local council.

All polling indicates that although they do have real support, the majority are positively opposed to them and actively dislike the UKIP.

So what we need to do is get the anti UKIP vote out.

In the May elections in the North West, there was was a massive anti BNP and UKIP campaign which resulted in them getting only 6 Councillors in the whole of the region. Compare this to similar areas in North and Midlands where they got far more.

We need to expose UKIP and look at what they say and their voting record in Europe. Such as their views that women deserve less pay, their wish to privatise the NHS and destroy workers employment rights.

We need to get this message out what UKIP is really about. We also need to get people to register to vote and set an positive agenda for multiculturalism in London. Jean encouraged all UNISON branches to affiliate to Hope not Hate!

Battle of Cable Street 75th Anniversary Rally

I wasn't able to make the march but I did manage to turn up to the Battle of Cable Street 75th Anniversary rally at St George in the East park, East London.   Home of the famous mural. Former UNISON General Secretary Rodney Bickeerstaffe was speaking as I came in. He reminded the rally of the close connection of Cable Street with the International Brigade who fought in Spain against the fascists 1936-1939.

I was sorry to have missed Max Levitas, a 97 year old real life veteran of the Battle speak. I have heard Max a number of times over the years on many issues but never at this event. Max still lives in Tower Hamlets but he comes shopping to Stratford and has stopped off at our Labour Party stalls over the years to have a chat. He is still a convinced communist but is pleased to see the Labour Party out campaigning and is still very vocal about the dangers we all face from the splitters and wreakers. 

The video is of Kosru Uddin, Tower Hamlets Labour Councillor, talking not as a polititian but as someone who had lived through racism and who stressed the importance of being united in order to defeat it.  

I was pleased that my UNISON Housing Association branch banner was there – thanks to activists Tony and Mary. There was a number of UNISON folk about including my former Branch secretary Jean Geldart (daughter of another Cable Street veteran and former Red Stepney Communist MP Phil Piratin) and Head of UNISON Local Government Heather Wakefield.  

There was some sectarian silliness by the usual suspects. But such ritualistic howling at the moon amidst grandiose claims of betrayal politics just adds to the colour of the occasion.   

The final speaker was former BNP member turned Hope Not Hate activist Matthew Collins whose recent book “Hate – My life in the British Far Right” I have just ordered. Just saying you are going to Smash the BNP or the EDL is not enough. We will not let them pass - but we also need to fully understand our enemy in order to overcome them. 

A Peoples' History of the Blitz: "We shall not forget them"

 This is another history of September 7 1940 and the London Blitz.

Check out the excellent "Hayes Peoples History" here.

"The working class communities of Inner London had suffered badly during the depression of the 1920’s and 30s with its high unemployment and slum housing. Now they suffered the heaviest levels of devastation – large parts of Stepney, Bethnal Green, Poplar, West Ham, Bermondsey, Deptford, Lambeth, St Pancras & Westminster were destroyed...

...According to Phil Piratin (future Communist Member of Parliament for Stepney)

"That night the East End burned, the dockside was ablaze...........

it lit up a great part of East and South East London....... It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire."

Daily Worker journalist Fred Pateman writing in the 9th September 1940 edition of the Daily Worker stated

“Yesterday, I walked through the valley of the shadow of death –the little streets of London’s East End.....Along the main roads is a steady stream of refugees – men with suitcases, women, with bundles, children with their pillows and their own cot covers – homeless in the heart of London.

Maya Angelou - History despite its wrenching pain cannot be unlived but if faced with courage need not be lived again"

Harry’s Place: Big Day Out

This is from “Harry’s Place” – An account of a guided tour last Sunday with local historian David Rosenberg, around the “radical Jewish East End”. Posted by Mira Vogel.

It looks like I missed a treat!

Late afternoon last Sunday - which was unbelievably warm and golden - a group of 35 or so Harry’s Place people and their sympathisers strolled companionably through the Radical Jewish East End on a tour led by East End Walks guide David Rosenberg.

We met at Gardiner’s Corner (Gardiners, like so much of the old East End, is no more) where an anti-fascist tram driver had marooned his tram to disrupt Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts during the Battle of Cable Street, October 4th 1936. Above us was an assertive-looking wall-mounted Star of David held aloft by a couple of proud lions with cutlasses. It was the sign of the now-no-more Jewish Daily Post. I’ve been walking up and down Whitechapel High Street for years and never noticed that - that’s why you go on things like this with people like David.

We proceeded to Manningtree Street, former location of the Popular Cafe, local meeting spot and one of many communication points for the Battle. Here David sketched Mosley’s veering political development from Conservative, when at 21 he had been the youngest MP in the Commons, to the disaffection over Ireland which propelled him to stand as an Independent and - via the Fabians, the left of the Independent Labour Party, and his own imaginatively-named New Party - to found the British Union of Fascists in 1932. Despite early support from the Mirror and Daily Mail, in David’s assessment the BUF was defeated by Mosley’s inability to build support as well as its own reputation for thuggery and antisemitism. He noted the debate about whether the antisemitism was a central policy plank or something borne out of desperation. Naturally, Mosley denied any antisemitism - if he targetted Jews, he said, it was because of what they were doing rather than who they were.

Next we heard about the different communities living in the area in the early 1900s - English, Irish, Somali, Chinese and the 120,000 or so Eastern European Jews taking refuge from pogroms back home. David described the difficulties this new community experienced in getting the growing Fascist threat recognised by the more established and prosperous Jewish community which had set up its institutions further west. Since East End Jews couldn’t gain adequate representation in this establishment, they set up a number of specifically East End institutions including the Workers Circle and Jewish People’s Council (David told us the Jewish Chronicle eventually embedded a journalist after which the editorial line shifted somewhat but, along with the Labour Party, the Jewish Board of Deputies still advised staying home on October 4th - a recommendation which was widely ignored).

We sat on railway sleepers opposite dinky Fieldgate Street Synagogue which nestles up against the East London Mosque. Guests from a nearby wedding milled around - it was an exquisite evening, perhaps the last of the year.

At this juncture David drew another of several books out of his bag (I think this one was ‘Our Flag Stays Red’) and introduced us to the radical Jewish East Ender Phil Piratin.

Next was Tower House, former hostel where Stalin stayed in a tiny room while attending an important Russian Communist get-together. Then we went to look at Paragon Mansions where the Communists had managed to blow a hole in Fascist support by organising a highly disciplined, successful and historically important campaign for better housing conditions. We heard how Irish Catholic and Eastern European Jewish women, prominent in the campaign, cooperated on their day-to-day jobs to help each other meet their picket commitments during the rent strikes. Then we moved on to Nelson Street, location of the last synagogue to be built in the East End, and heard about young Charlie Goodman, arrested for shinning up a lampost to urge on the anti-Fascists and, later, veteran of the Spanish Civil War.

Coming to Cable Street we imagined the scene - the mattress barricades, overturned truck and swarms of Irish dockers, Jews and Communists shouting the Spanish Civil War slogan “No Pasaran” as they confronted the Blackshirts and their mounted police escort (brought down by marbles!). And they succeeded - the Fascists didn’t pass. We ended at Dave Binnington’s enormous mural of the Battle, literally and figuratively a riot of people, missiles, banners, chamberpots and their contents, trampling horses and cossack-like policemen. Vandalised by the far right soon after completion in 1982, the mural now has a special easy-clean coating. Round the corner local fighters in the Spanish Civil War are commemorated by a fading plaque.

I’ve missed out a lot but David runs this tour regularly so you can go and see for yourself. My friends and I very much enjoyed the way he mixed historical account, vignette and undogmatic socialist commentary - the characters and their adventures, the connections he made between workers’ solidarity and anti-racism, the oppositions between newcomer and establishment, and the implicit debt of rememberance to those who fought Fascists at Cable Street and in Spain. Particularly impressive was his dignification by the Former Leader of Tower Hamlets Council in a drive-by shout of thanks (unrelated to his tours, but nevertheless).

The walk ended in balmy twilight and on David’s recommendation a good few of us went to eat at Aladin’s on Brick Lane. It was all fun.

You were missed - come with next time

East End Celebrations – real life rich tapestries

Last night I went to the Tower Hamlets UNISON branch crimbo meal at the Mez restaurant in the Isle of Dogs, E14. It was also a “surprise” 60th Birthday celebration for Branch Secretary, Jean Geldart, who is also the Chair of the UNISON Local Government service group.

Jean is due to retire next year and has worked for Tower Hamlets Council (I think) since she left university. She is also the daughter of the Phil Piratin, who was famously elected as a Communist Party of Great Britain MP for Mile End in 1945. Now, Jean and I, have not always seen “eye to eye” about various things (especially blogging) so I hope she doesn’t mind me mentioning her!

The branch had somehow persuaded the restaurant to play “The Internationale” as they bought in the birthday cakes. At the same time everyone stood up and most raised their arms in a red salute and sang along to the song (see photo). I politely stood up and raised my glass and of course took pictures. I’m not that sure what the mostly city clientele thought about this but they didn’t seem to mind (or perhaps comprehend?). Our table also didn’t really care.

The restaurant is built on the site of the old traditional docker's pub the “Queen” (also known as the “Queen of the Isle”) which was knocked down in 2004. I never went into it but was reliably informed by someone who should know, that it was the sort of pub that you would be out of place if you had two whole ears.

Earlier that day I had been to another crimbo Party, at an “elder persons block” in Bow. There was a singer/guitarist and an unbelievably impressive spread. As well as the usual wide range of different sandwiches, coat-tail sausages, meats, prawns, samosa, salad, ham and egg pie, dips, crisps etc. There was a massive tray of traditional jellied eels (sorry, I may have lived longer in the East End than any where else but please don’t ask me...) as well as fiery hot chicken curry.

The residents all appeared to be having a good time (I won’t say “a right old knees up”). Well done to the staff and volunteers.

In all a good day.