Tracy-Ann Oberman is right to highlight the importance of the battle of Cable Street in the history of the working-class movement (The battle of Cable Street is entwined in my family’s history – and its message of hope still resonates, 28 December). One lesson the left appears to neglect is that Cable Street was, indeed, a battle, not a passive demonstration.
Anti-fascists engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with both Blackshirts and their police escorts throughout the day. Fascists were attacked by local people from the moment they began to assemble at Tower Hill, and fighting continued until the British Union of Fascists’ march was called off.
We have become too accustomed to seeing the fight for a more just society as being primarily a battle of ideas. Fascism, though, seeks to build a new physical force in the name of creating “order” at the expense of all those who do not fit in the society it seeks to bring about. As the battle of Cable Street shows, it has to be physically challenged, not simply demonstrated against.
The same should apply to the country-casual neo-Mosleyites of today. Faced with a threat to “people from every minority and working-class background”, we do not need to adhere to liberal pieties about fascism’s right to free speech when we have to drive it off the streets in order to defend ourselves.
As well as resisting fascism, we must also challenge the everyday racism and violence of the status quo. We should see 13 May 2021 as part of the same tradition as the battle of Cable Street – a day when hundreds of people in Glasgow, shouting “these are our neighbours, let them go”, surrounded an Immigration Enforcement van until the two men detained in it were freed. As Tracy-Ann’s article shows, we have to fight constantly for each other against forces which recognise that the development of working-class solidarity is a threat to a society rooted in sustained inequality.
Nick Moss
London
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
