Deputy Mayor and colleagues mark Cable St anniversary

CLLR MAIUM TALUKDAR, Deputy Mayor of Tower Hamlets, was joined by councillor colleagues outside the Town Hall as he led calls to remember the message “they shall not pass”.

Aspire councillor colleagues joining the Deputy Mayor included Cllr Bodrul Choudhury (Bromley South), Cllr Gulam Kibria Choudhury (Poplar), Cllr Ahmodur Khan (Blackwall & Cubitt Town), Cllr Kabir Ahmed (Weavers) and Cllr Halima Islam (Bethnal Green East).

The councillors stood above a banner which referred to the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when trade unions and the labour movement united to stop members of the pro-Hitler British Union of Fascists marching in Cable Street – then a largely Jewish area. The second slogan on that banner committed the councillors to uphold that slogan today.

There is one more clash with the ultra-right/fascists that Cllr Talukdar remembers. He was a teenager living on the Isle of Dogs when Millwall ward elected the first British National Party (BNP) Councillor to be elected in the UK. Elected in a by-election, he served for a turbulent seven months, before the voters emphatically rejected him at the next scheduled election. Although the extreme right have not won a subsequent election in Tower Hamlets, Reform UK are present elsewhere in the East End – and even control Havering Council. As the Aspire councillors reminded us, we have to be ever vigilant!

Aspire Councillors later joined demonstrators at St George’s Town Hall, Cable Street, where Mayor Lutfur Rahman spoke to the crowds.

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