Racism and xenophobia: we need to recapture the spirit of Cable Street

It was as shaming as it was sad to learn that Muslim female colleagues of my wife’s are afraid to visit France.

It was photos from Nice that had been the final straw. They showed four armed policemen converging on a woman in Muslim clothes on a Nice beach, to tell her to wear less. My first thought was of my youth, when the cry was for women to wear more on beaches. Ironic that society always feels it can tell women what to wear or not to wear.

French police move in on an existential threat to our civilisation:
a woman wearing too many clothes on a beach in Nice

My second thought was bleaker. Whether we like the police or not, we all ultimately rely on them. They’re supposed to make us feel safer, indeed to keep us safer. At their best, they should only be a threat over things we’ve done; but these police were a threat for what that woman was. Nothing suggested she’d done anything to harm anyone else, but because she was Muslim and felt the need to follow what she believed were the strictures of her religion concerning dress, she became a target for the police.

Where does a woman like that turn for protection if the police start off predisposed against her? No wonder my wife’s colleagues are so afraid of France. They feel unwelcome in a country that prides itself on being the homeland of human rights.

Sadly, we’ve been here before. At the end of the nineteenth century and for the first few decades of the twentieth, in many countries it wasn’t safe to be a Jew. Dress differently to mark your Judaism and, particularly in central or eastern Europe, you gave up your right to expect the police to look after you.

In some nations, the movement went to terrible extremes. In Germany, it turned into Kristallnacht where Jewish shops and business were vandalised and many Jews were beaten or killed in the streets, a harbinger of the full-scale Holocaust to come. In others, it was an insidious, subterranean hostility, which might be as mild as a refusal to allow a Jew into a club: you may remember the story of Groucho Marx, who was told he could join a club on condition he didn’t use the pool; he asked whether his daughter might be allowed to wade in up to her knees, since she was only half Jewish.

In Britain, the British Union of Fascists had been organised by a former Labour (and previously Conservative then independent) MP, Oswald Mosley. It wanted to bring anti-Semitism out into the open and even aped the militaristic uniforms of the German and Italian Fascists. In October 1936, the BUF decided to march through heavily Jewish areas in the East End of London. Anti-Fascists felt otherwise and mobilised to prevent them.

The result was the battle of Cable Street of 4 October 1936, whose eightieth anniversary fell last week. The battle didn’t pit anti-Fascists against Fascists, but anti-Fascists against the police. But the result was that Mosley got well away from there and the BUF rallied in Hyde Park, in the West End, instead of the East End.

Battle of Cable Street: the Fascists did not pass
The BBC spoke to a couple of survivors

Views differ as to whether Cable Street was as significant in halting the progress of fascism in England as many have believed. But it seems to me that whatever it may have achieved concretely, it was hugely important symbolically: 20,000 turned out against the Fascists, only 2000-3000 on the other side. The voice saying ‘no’ to an abomination was by far the louder. The battle is much more significant for what it revealed of an attitude than for what it may or may not have accomplished.

At a time when there’s once more a terrible lurch towards the far right across the great democracies, with increasingly overt xenophobia or downright racism, we need to recapture that attitude. Whether we’re confronting Trump in the US, UKIP in England, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, it’s the spirit of Cable Street that has to drive us.

And – who knows – why not start by finding it in France?

Thank you for the irony, Daily Mail

It’s not often that the British Daily Mail makes me smile, but it did today.

It was the headline that got me going: “WHO WILL SPEAK FOR ENGLAND?” it demanded to be told.

Usually I’m put off by what is, after all, the paper that lines the sewers of British journalism. It could have been for the Mail that the celebrated ditty was written:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
thank God!
the British journalist.

But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed,
there's no occasion to.

In this case, however, my reaction was that of a lover of irony. There were, after all, simply too many layers of irony in that headline for them not to be appreciated.

The article is about what the Mail sees as a battle between Britain and the EU, currently being waged without much conviction by David Cameron’s government. From the perspective of the Mail and others that share its political outlook, this is a battle for the very soul of Britain, threatened today by all those nasty foreigners across the Channel.

The reference in the headline is to one of the most poignant moments in the history of the House of Commons. I’ve mentioned it more than once before, but it was an inspiring event so I make no apology for talking about it again.

The then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had just flown home from a meeting with Hitler, in which he’d been joined by the French Prime Minister Daladier. On arrival back home, he had waved an agreement that, he claimed, guaranteed “peace for our time.” It gave Hitler a free hand to dismember Czechoslovakia, in return for his not threatening any French or British vital interests.

Hitler ignored the agreement and within a year, we were at war with Nazi Germany.

The time of the agreement was perhaps one of the most humiliating in Britain’s long and colourful career. A great many people felt that way, even then. When Chamberlain made a statement on his meeting to the House of Commons it was greeted by silence – shamed silence. And when the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Arthur Greenwood, stood to reply for the Opposition, a voice called out from the other side of the house – the Conservative, Government side – “speak for England, Arthur.”

So that was irony number 1. It was a Tory, Leo Amery, who called on a Labourite to speak against the Tory Prime Minister.

Irony number 2 is that he made that call in the name of England. But the whole of Britain was affected. Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish would share in the ignominy, as they would share in the sacrifices that the war would entail.

Irony number 3 is that the Mail claims to be speaking for Britain, and also referred only to England.

Irony number 4 is that Leo Amery was speaking out against Nazi Germany. The Mail is railing against a bunch of politicians, no better or worse than others, but as committed to democracy as any current member of the British Parliament.

The Mail says in its article that it’s drawing no parallel between the EU and Nazi Germany. But have you been watching the excellent French series on TV at the moment, Spin (Les hommes de l’ombre)? There’s a moment in it in which the protagonist refers to her adversary as “disloyal” and immediately corrects herself to “loyal”. It’s deliberate: her correction is designed to free her from attack for her insult, but the insult is out there.

The Mail’s use of that headline draws the parallel, even if the body of the article denies it.

Finally, and funniest of all, the Mail is the newspaper which, back in the 1930s, supported Hitler and his British (indeed, English) opposite number, Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. How wonderful that it should now quote the great anti-appeasement Tory Amery to lambast David Cameron over his support for the EU…

Glorious stuff, isn’t it? Well worth a smile. And I suspect there’ll be plenty more such irony before we get our referendum on continued British membership of the EU.

That’s British membership including the English, by the way.