NEXT WEEKEND I will march with other anti-racists through East London and then co-chair a rally with local Bengali activist Julie Begum to mark the 85th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street.

In 1936 fascism was advancing across Europe. Here in Britain, with nearly three million unemployed, mass hunger, hopelessness and a loss of faith in conventional politics, a wannabe aristocratic politician, Oswald Mosley, planned to make a show of strength in East London where his movement — the British Union of Fascists — had its biggest branches.

Those four branches with thousands of members and supporters, formed a horseshoe around an enclave where 60,000 working-class Jews lived in fear of daily violence from Mosley’s Blackshirts.