channel4.com - ORIGINATION

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1936 Cable Street Riots

Writer: David Rosenberg

How fascism came to Britain

Europe in the 1930s witnessed a massive growth of militaristic, anti-democratic movements that were extremely nationalist and racist. Jewish people were specifically and systematically targeted by these movements.

After Mussolini's fascists took over Italy, Hitler and Franco swept to power in Germany and Spain, and right wing anti-Semitic movements grew stronger in Hungary, Rumania and Poland. Every week Britain's Jewish newspapers reported savage acts of violence perpetrated against Jews by these movements in central and Eastern Europe. Jews who had lived in these countries for centuries were characterised as "aliens" and "outsiders" who caused every problem.

Fascists everywhere exploit people's fears in times of economic depression, widespread poverty and high unemployment. In the 1930s Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF) blamed the Jews. This is similar to what happened in the UK in the 1970s when the National Front in Britain claimed that Black and Asian communities were "taking our jobs and homes".

Solly Kaye – an East End Jew who later became a Communist councillor – remembers how "the fascists involved people on the basis of envy and fear, by saying 'over there the Jews, they've got your houses, over there the Jews, they've got your jobs' – even though we were living in bloody poverty with bugs crawling all over us in the night."

Those gentiles who refused to blame their fellow impoverished workers who happened to speak Yiddish; who asked questions about who really controlled the country's economic life, were drowned out by the fascists' simplistic but plausible propaganda.

Photo of Mosley, BUF, Albert Hall, 1935
BUF members welcome their leader, Oswald Mosley at a packed meeting at the Albert Hall in 1935. (LP Pictures)
The fascists appealed to all classes, especially workers. They were led, by Sir Oswald Mosley – a prominent member of Britain's upper classes and a former Tory then Labour MP. He was not unique. Many of the strongest supporters of Hitler's Germany were upper class, such as A K Chesterton, Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay (a Tory MP), the Earl of Galloway, the 2^nd Baron Redesdale and several persons among the "Cliveden Set", and they also gave encouragement to Mosley's anti-Semitic movement.

In several countries, including Britain, the arguments of fascists were shared by some leaders in the Catholic Church. Canon Palmer addressed his congregants in Ilford in 1934 on the "unclean film industry" and recommended them to boycott cinemas "until such Jewish filth is swept right away." In 1936, a popular British Union of Fascists street speaker, Mick Clarke, urged followers in Bethnal Green to fight against the Jews if they didn't want to see "our churches pulled down…and nuns carried through the streets and raped."

Mosley's movement >