SEVENTY-FIVE years ago, Max Levitas, then a 21-year-old living in London’s East End, stood beside Irish dockers and Jewish tailors as they built barricades across Cable Street to block a march by Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts.
Yesterday morning, Mr Levitas, now a still-sprightly 96, marched down the same street, where in 1936 the fascists, and the police who had attempted to enforce their right-to-march, were attacked ferociously, including by women who threw milk bottles from the roofs.
News that Mosley’s fascists were intending to parade through the East End had provoked fear among the district’s Jewish community, some of whom had fled Hitler’s Germany during the previous three years.
The threat brought the immigrant communities together, remembered Mr Levitas.
“There were so many different issues that came together in 1936,” he said. “There were the rent strikes, lack of housing, the fight in Spain, the fight against fascism here and the battle against unemployment.
“All these issues were harnessed into one. The fascists tried to divide us, but we fought against segregation.
“The more you segregate the worse it becomes. The question is, ‘What unites us?’ It isn’t one thing that unites us, it’s many things,” Mr Levitas added.
Hetty Bauer (106), the oldest survivor of the Cable Street clashes that marked the beginning of the end for the British Union of Fascists, told the crowd: “I’ve been a campaigner for peace since world war one,” before leading them in a chant of: “No Pasarán – they shall not pass.”
Today, the area is no longer Irish or Jewish-dominated. The majority are Afro-Caribbean, or Asian Muslims, so yesterday’s march to St George’s Town Hall, which still displays a mural trumpeting the defeat of the fascists, was led by the Cardboard Citizens’ Samba Band.
Echoes of 1936 are still strong following last month’s demonstrations in the area by the far-right English Defence League (EDL), which opposes immigration.
“We know that they are not really modern. They are no different from 1936,” said Mr Levitas, who became a Communist Party councillor in the years after the Cable Street confrontation.
Trades Union Congress deputy general secretary Frances O’Grady told the defence league leader Stephen Lennon, who faces prosecution after he turned up at the demonstration despite a court order to stay away: “You are not a voice of the working class. We are. You are just a voice of fascism.”
Last week, Mr Lennon was convicted of common assault for head-butting a man at a protest in Blackburn.
