We Know who the Agitators Are

By Anonymous

Sunday 4th October 1936 saw fascists take to the streets of East London under the direction of Oswald Mosley to provoke Jewish residents of that area. With the permission of the Home Secretary John Simon, the British Union of Fascists were allowed to march and gathered at their muster point at Tower Hill at 1.25 pm, where they were attacked by hundreds of anti-fascists waiting for them.

The march down Commercial St towards the East End initially went ahead but was blocked by up to 100,000 counterprotestors, many of whom threw stones at the fascists. The police then advised a new route via Cable Street, where the opposition barricaded and employed the slogan of “no pasarán”, contemporaneous with Spanish Republicanism.

The vast majority of the violence on what has since been known as the Battle of Cable Street did not actually involve the Mosleyites directly, but between counterdemonstrators and the London police. The police, seeing that Cable St was too narrow and wishing to end the disorder, told Mosley that he was permitted to take his march to the West End instead; Mosley followed the law and headed west.

Does this make the British Union of Fascists a non-violent organisation? Only 6 of the 85 arrested were fascists that day. Were the counterdemonstrators the violent ones? This points to a very interesting picture of ethnic provocation, triumphalist marches and state assistance… [1]

90 years on… thankfully the police are not on Drumcree Rd to escort the Orange Order forcefully down the Garvaghy Rd, and the troupe of 35 Orangemen consists supposedly of octogenarians and a singular banner. There are reports that the Loyal Orange Institution have offered a “one-and-done” deal, whereby the 35 walk down the majority-Catholic road once more, and never again. None of this means non-violence, and none of the “law-breaking” by lawmakers such as Michelle O’Neill means violence either.

I attended the solidarity gathering at the Garvaghy Rd on Saturday afternoon, at which potentially over 10,000 protestors took part from across all of Ireland. I saw similar signs of “no pasarán” and “Garvaghy Rd Says No,” with a genuine resistance to going back to the past being present in the air. Most poignant was a banner of the three Quinn brothers – “no road is worth a life, let alone the lives of three little boys”, it read under – a quote from the Orange Order’s Co. Armagh chaplain [2]. The brothers’ family received death threats from loyalists days before the attack, and after they lost their lives in a UVF arson attack, the Orange Order continued to protest. That’s who we are dealing with.

Drumcree is the epitome of loyalist territorial violence, whether it is 35 octogenarians or 10,000 young marchers. The moralising assertion of breaking the law as a gotcha against Michelle O’Neill and Breandán Mac Cionnaith is just rich, just as it was when the fascists were legally authorised to march in London 90 years ago. Mac Cionnaith made the connection to Cable Street to immense applause, and with a fundamental feeling of solidarity.

If you can take one thing from this, it’s that legal and unlawful are not synonymous with non-violent and violent; it’s often the opposite. It’s not about being between a rock and a hard place as much as it’s about being between right and wrong.

Sources

[1] The Story of the Battle of Cable Street, National Archives. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/the-battle-of-cable-street/

[2] Boffey, D. (2026). “Absence of violence in Drumcree does not make standoff any less significant”. The Guardian, 28 Sep 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/sep/28/absence-of-violence-in-drumcree-does-not-make-standoff-any-less-significant