ANTI-RACISTS will take to the streets of London’s East End tomorrow to celebrate 85 years since the historic victory by massed ranks of anti-fascists in the 1936 Battle of Cable Street.

On October 4 1936, an estimated 250,000 people blocked a planned march by Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists through an area of Tower Hamlets populated by many Jewish families.

The resistance united trade unionists, communists, anarchists, the British Jewish community, Irish dockworkers, socialist groups and other anti-fascists.

They used trams, buses and other huge materials to create barricades while valiantly resisting police attempts to force a way through for Moseley and his blackshirts.

The anti-fascists’ slogan, taken from the Spanish civil war which was raging at the time, was “No Pasaran” — They Shall Not Pass — and it will be displayed during the event.

Communist Party of Britain general secretary Robert Griffiths is convening the event. In 1936 the Communist Party of Great Britain had the leading role in organising resistance to the fascist march.

Mr Griffiths said: “Racism, including anti-semitism, still blights many people’s lives today. We should take inspiration from the unity that won the Battle of Cable Street.”

The battle is commemorated permanently by a street mural on the gable end of the former town hall in Cable Street in Tower Hamlets.

The 1936 clash was the culmination of two years of resistance to fascist mobilisations, including in Stockton, Worthing, the Rhondda, and on Holbeck Moor in Leeds.