Jews omitted from BBC London report on historic Battle of Cable Street

A BBC London News segment on the historic anti-fascist Battle of Cable Street failed to make any mention of the major role played by east London’s Jewish community.

It comes after the national broadcaster was forced to apologise for omitting the word ‘Jews’ in its Holocaust Memorial Day coverage and after a December 2025 episode of The Repair Shop failed to mention that the Kindertransport rescued Jewish children from Nazi persecution.

On 4 October 1936, the British Union of Fascists, led by Sir Oswald Mosley, attempted to march through the East End of London, in what was widely seen as a an attempt to intimidate or provoke the inhabitants of the area, which had a significant Jewish population at the time.

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Subsequently, there were a series of clashes between the Metropolitan police, there to protect the BUF march, and thousands of communists, trade unionists, Irish dockers and Jewish demonstrators who took to the streets in a successful attempt to stop the march from proceeding through the area.

The confrontation has been memorialised in anti-Fascist history and has been at the centre of books, TV shows and plays – with a musical about Cable Street now opening for a third run at the Marylebone Theatre. However, in a two-minute report last week from the BBC about the musical, the corporation’s journalist described it only as being “about community under siege during some turbulent and violent days in London’s recent past” with no specific mention of Jews.

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The words “Jews” and “Jewish” were also left out when the BBC reporter, Thomas Magill, interviewed the show’s Jewish director Adam Lenson, featuring him describing it only as “a new musical about a true event that happened in London’s East End in 1936” with a vague reference to the “communities” who “put aside their differences, came together and said ‘Not in our town’.”

Failing to mention the Jewish presence in blocking the march, the BBC reporter said: “Those communities that joined forces included the Irish, Dockers from the nearby Thames and others”.

In the report, the musical’s set designer, Yoav Segal, recalls his own grandfather being at Cable Street on the day, but his heritage is not mentioned.

Contributing to the piece, Professor Nadia Valman of Queen Mary University of London describes the battle as “a mass movement that united people from extremely different backgrounds, different religions, different places of origin, different languages, and young people and old people,” but with any mention of Jews also omitted by the BBC.

In a scathing post on Twitter/X, former US antisemitism envoy Professor Deborah Lipstadt responded: “This is not a mistake but a pattern that the BBC is perfecting @BBCNews Make Jews invisible: Holocaust w/out Jews, Mosley Blackshirt attacks w/out Jews”

Alex Hearn, a director of Labour Against Antisemitism, said: “As with their Holocaust coverage, the antisemitic nature of Cable Street has been erased by the @BBC”

The BBC reporter in question does make clear the role of the Jewish community Cable Street clear in a separate online article for the BBC.