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STATEMENT FROM UNITED EAST END

Thursday 22 January, 2026

We have been informed by the Metropolitan Police that UKIP will not be permitted tohold their "Walk with Jesus" in our borough on 31st January.
We warmly welcome this. It is recognition of our community's determination to stand together and insist that Tower Hamlets is No Place for Hate. From the Battle of Cable Street 90 years ago, to the defeat of the racist groups such as the National Front, British National Party and English Defence League, we will always oppose racism andprejudice.
On this occasion, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) tried to use Christianity as a false flag for sowing division. In response, many churches have joined local people, of all faiths and none, to say UKIP are not welcome here.
Mthr. Bernadette Hegarty, a Vicar of St Paul's Church Bow Common since 2014, said "Churches and church groups in Tower Hamlets work closely with the Mayor and United East End to oppose the Far-Right because its politics of division harm the common good and threaten vulnerable people. We are particularly concerned when Far-Right groups use Christian symbols, language or imagery at their events which distorts the Gospel and misrepresents the faith. In Tower Hamlets, we seek to&nbsp; strengthen trust, encourage understanding and stand with our neighbours against extremism with compassion rather than fear."
But the danger of fascism has not gone away. Across the country, we are facing a growing threat from the Far-Right, including the Reform Party, who repeatedly use racist scapegoating to try to win support.
That is why, on 28th March, there will be a national demonstration against the Far-Right in central London, organised by the Together Alliance, calling for hope, love and unity.
Recent research found that 91% of Tower Hamlets residents think people from different backgrounds get along well together. We are not an "island of strangers" as the Prime Minister has said, and we don't need Nick Tenconi of UKIP or Nigel Farage of Reform telling us how we should live, prey, or who our neighbours should be.
United East End (UEE) was founded in 2010 to oppose the EDL. It is a non-party political alliance of local community organisations, faith groups, trade unions, and anti-racist groups. We encourage everyone to sign our statement which can be accessed here:&nbsp;<a href="https://unitedeastend.org.uk/ukip-walk-with-jesus/">https://unitedeastend.org.uk/u...</a>
Thank you.

Dr Glyn Robbins & Dr Abdullah Faliq

Founding Members, United East End

Logo for United EastEnd featuring colorful wave design and bold text.

Parish of the Isle of Dogs




STATEMENT FROM UNITED EAST END

Thursday 22 January, 2026

We have been informed by the Metropolitan Police that UKIP will not be permitted tohold their "Walk with Jesus" in our borough on 31st January.

We warmly welcome this. It is recognitio...

Statement from United East End

We are still in the Season of Christmas, if not still the Feast,&nbsp;so it seems appropriate to publish Barbara Liddell's further reflections about Christmas on the Island -Editor)Christmas at school was both exciting and disappointing. The exciting bits fortunately far outweighed the disappointment. So exciting bits first, learning carols like 'We Three Kings' and roaring out the O before 'star of wonder star of light' and making parodies of&nbsp; 'While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks' into washed their socks and again&nbsp; 'star of wonder star of light' turning into somebody caught their pants alight! That was great and everyone was very knowledgeable singing in ' We wish you a Merry Christmas' that it was KIN (Family) and not King. Our school, St. Luke's had such high standard of education, that when I went to Grammar school I didn't seem to be taught anything new until the third year. The other exciting thing in my eyes was colouring in the Nativity Story Frieze that, when completed, hung around the Hall, I loved art and tried to get one of the Magi to colour -&nbsp;they had crowns and turbans with jewels.

Then there was the disappointment , I wanted to be Mary in the Nativity Play, I was in the leavers' class for two years, so could have had two bites at the cherry; but sadly the casting of a tiny blonde haired girl with pig tails didn't really seem apt, and both years I had the demanding task of playing a 'Child'. Both times the part was given to dark haired tall girls, they didn't need to act really- more simper and look religious! Being a total know-all I had unconsciously learnt everyone's lines, so on the Big Night I was seen to&nbsp;to mouth everyone's parts on and off the stage. My father noticed this! The other ' Child' actress was my now sister- in -law of 54 years and she has starred in many AM DRAM&nbsp; &nbsp;productions (good grounding )&nbsp;and I have been on Stage with Sir Ian McKellen- but that's another story.

Our family home was an apartment or flat in a nineteen thirties block overlooking the Millwall Dock( where the Sailing Centre is now). My grandmother lived there all through WW2&nbsp; and it is still standing now. At the end of the war my parents and sisters came to live there with her until she died in 1950 . Sadly I don't remember her as I was only 11 months old but through her I have my Island heritage.&nbsp;

Those flats were very strictly run and there were lots of rules in place, housing was in such short supply that you could be evicted very easily for breaking them. So when my parents somehow adopted a cat they lived in fear of 'Moggie'&nbsp; being discovered. We lived on the third floor ( no lift)&nbsp; and so in the days before cat litter it was mostly my job to go down to the waste ground/debris&nbsp; and collect earth(dirt) to place into a thin wooden tomato box for Moggie's&nbsp;Convenience.....a polite word for toilets when I was young. All went well for a few years, we had several Moggies. It was a few days before Christmas and we had put up the decorations,&nbsp;put the real little Christmas tree in its big pot and put on the glass baubles and tinsel. No plastic in those days. We had all gone to bed but were woken by an awfully loud crash. We all came&nbsp;bleary eyed into the lounge where we were horrified to see the tree tipped onto the floor surrounded by smashed baubles and broken ornaments. My father had secured the real tree in the pot with earth and Moggie had thought he had been given a sort of new ensuite and had availed himself of the facilities! Mum said she was tempted to see if you really could 'Swing a cat' in our small lounge.&nbsp; The next day my father bought an artificial tree. He was really taken in by the salesman's patter. He said "look no needles to drop and stick in you feet, and it folds up for storage so we won't have to buy another tree ever". Please don't imagine it was in any way like the artificial trees you can buy today- this one was a prototype actually it was almost Picasso in it's design not really looking like a tree. It was like a&nbsp; broom handle on a tripod with about twelve 'branches' that looked like loo cleaning brushes painted green. It was the ugliest monstrosity and I am being kind. We called the Harpic tree- Harpic being a toilet cleaner. We put up with it for a few years but covered it with so much tinsel and tons of baubles you could just about make out a tree shape under all the camouflage! Oddly it was left behind when my parents moved house.

I was inspired to write a poem about Moggie and so here it is:-

'Twas the night before Christmas and all through our flat a creature was stirring 'twas Moggie our cat.&nbsp;

He'd gone into the lounge and what did he see a new Cat's Convenience ,our Real Christmas tree.&nbsp;

We'd put it in soil hoping that it would grow, we shouldn't have done it but how did we know?

It wasn't the cat's fault 'cos all round the tree was the usual 'dirt' that he'd use for a pee.&nbsp;

Cat Litter a concept not known in those days, our Moggie left calling cards multiple ways.&nbsp;

In our third floor mansion no pets were allowed ,so we hid him away from the Madd(EN)ing' Crowd!&nbsp;

Our clandestine Moggie from the school of hard knocks, did his business each day in some dirt in a box.&nbsp;

Imagine his pleasure on finding the boon of his own inside toilet in our living room.

No dirt from the Debris was soiling his feet, but here in the warm a private en suite.&nbsp;

The&nbsp; crash was horrendous it rattled the door, imagine my mum when she looked at the floor.&nbsp;

It was scattered with tinsel and balls smashed to pieces ,it looked like the cat had been chasing some meeces!&nbsp;

Mum lost her temper and without taking a breath chased the cat round the room in a live Wall of Death.&nbsp;

She tried to nab Moggie, to just prove like that, in our tiny front room you could still swing a cat!&nbsp;

She wouldn't have hurt him she loved him so well she just cleaned up the mess and disguised the Wee smell.

Our dad learned his lesson and made it official, in future our Real Tree would be Artificial!&nbsp;

Some of the words have been changed to protect the public!?

Next instalment&hellip;..New Year’s Eve on the Island.

A woman in vintage attire decorates a silver Christmas tree with ornaments in a classic 1940s setting.

We are still in the Season of Christmas, if not still the Feast, so it seems appropriate to publish Barbara Liddell's further reflections about Christmas on the Island -Editor)

Christmas at school was both exciting and disappointing. The exciting...

Christmas on the Isle of Dogs (2) - Barbara Liddell

The cycle of Christmas is not yet closed. The liturgy of the sixth of January is a new climax. It is a feast which in ancient times was celebrated even more splendidly than Christmas. Even at the present day it has the place in the eastern Church which Christmas has for us. It celebrates a magnificent concept, that of the epiphany or manifestation of the Lord.
For this, three events of the history of salvation are taken together: the homage of the wise men from the East, the baptism of Christ in the river Jordan and the marriage feast of Cana - three initial manifestations of his glory.

For the epistle one of the most jubilant texts of the book of Isaiah was chosen, 60:1-6, "Arise, shine, Jerusalem". The LORD is to make his brightness shine forth in Jerusalem, so that the heathen nations are drawn to it. Through Jesus, the salvation of God did in fact appear in Jerusalem and Palestine.

The gospel takes the first of the three saving events. It is a story which Matthew places at the beginning of his gospel, Jesus' first manifestation to non-Jews, which is an indication that the world outside Israel is also affected by Jesus' coming. By means of a sign among the stars and a Jewish prophecy, some "wise men" from the East (perhaps Persia or Babylon or Arabia) discover the child with his mother Mary and offer him royal homage. Since the time of the catacombs, paintings of the scene have been one of the favourite ways of depicting Jesus' manifestation to the whole world. In some countries, like Holland and Germany, it is called the feast of the three kings&nbsp;

The story of the wise men has an aftermath in the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem and the flight into Egypt. The death of these children who unknowingly gave their blood for Jesus is celebrated close to Christmas, 28 December, which is called the Feast of the Holy Innocents.&nbsp;
The significance of the flight into Egypt is that Jesus, on his return, followed in the footsteps of the people which had come up from Egypt long ago. Matthew calls attention to it by saying, "This was to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, 'Out of Egypt have I called my son'" (Mt 2:15. Jesus is the Son, much more than the people was. In him, the people will return from the house of bondage, to be slaves no more.
A New Catechism&nbsp;compiled by The Higher Catechetical Institute, Nijmegan&nbsp;&nbsp;trans&nbsp;Kevin Smyth.

A woman in a golden robe holds a sleeping baby wearing a red garment.

The cycle of Christmas is not yet closed. The liturgy of the sixth of January is a new climax. It is a feast which in ancient times was celebrated even more splendidly than Christmas. Even at the present day it has the place in the eastern Church ...

The Epiphany of the Lord - Excerpt from A New Cathechism, Catholic Faith for Adults

So much to write about I have divided this opus into two parts, the second part taking in New Year.
Christmas! What a wonderful word, as a child born after WW2, I hadn't experienced the hardship and deprivation of former Christmases with food rationing and homes being torn apart( literally). Born in 1950 by the time I was old enough to care ,sugar, that great Christmas ingredient was taken off ration! My sisters born in 1939 and 41 actually benefited by having much stronger teeth!
Christmas on the Island was a bit different to the Dickensian idea depicted on Christmas Cards! There were no Georgian windowed shops, no Mail Coaches pulled by teams of horses and I never a Robin on the Island until 2002 ,and that was in the underground car park at Canary Wharf!
Not having a 'high street' the sprinkling of shops along West Ferry Road (three words then) and Manchester Road did their best to brighten up the grey 'bombed' streets that are always in black and white in my memory. Grocers' shops displayed Christmas cakes and special pickles in huge glass jars. Things appeared to eat that you only saw at Christmas.... picked red cabbage, picked walnuts, pickled onions, brown or silver skinned. There was also 'Mincemeat'in jars, this puzzled me ,there was no meat it was lots of different&nbsp; dried fruits and candied peel with little white blobs of suet, this mixture was the filling for home made mince pies. Originally in medieval and Tudor times mince pies contained real meat with a few herbs and spices. Traditionally they were cradle or coffin shaped pastry receptacles for chopped meat containing thirteen ingredients for Christ and the Twelve Apostles, lamb often included symbolically for the shepherds. From&nbsp; Georgian times onward the popularity of sugar made the once meat filled pies into sweet filled pastries with just small bits of suet (animal fat) to replace the meat and by the end of the 1800's they were totally sweet.
After the War rationing ended ,and with the return of sugar the Christmas Cakes were covered in the most horrendous chalk like icing with the odd snow man or fir tree ornaments on top. There were also odd looking fruit cakes called Dundee cakes, they were slightly lighter in texture than the Iced variety which was so crammed and dense with dried fruit and alcohol it was like a Christmas Pudding. Dundee cakes were topped with almonds pressed into a circular pattern and glazed . There were also Tunis cakes which looked like soft iced sponge cakes but were always dry ( my father said they were so-called because they had sand in them) - we won one in a raffle! The shop windows were dotted with small balls of cotton wool to represent snowflakes and sometimes there were cotton wool snowmen and giant crackers made from crepe paper. In pre-plastic days most decorations were made of crepe paper concertina-ed honeycombewise into bells and balls that would fold flat for storage they were feats of geometric engineering!
Most people went to the nearby market at Chrisp Street(nearest DLR All Saints). The butchers would hang turkeys, chickens and rabbits outside the shops, all with their heads and fur on (it was awful for a city kid to see, although people did keep chickens and rabbits in their gardens. I never really got it that my friend's pets were potential dinners!&nbsp; The best thing about&nbsp; Chrisp street was Woolworths that marvellous Emporium of everything you needed and more. One year I had saved up 19/11, nineteen shillings and eleven pence (one penny less than a pound). I managed to get presents ( mostly talc and bath cubes for my sisters ) Brylcreem hair cream for my dad and Bourjois&nbsp; Evening In Paris perfume for my mum.&nbsp; Later in life I wrote about Woolworths in a competition and I won and was chosen to open the newly refurbished store cutting the red ribbon, fame at last!
I loved Christmas preparations at School I went to the old St. Luke's and will write a little about it in part two. The religious part of Christmas was not a 'big thing 'I know this sounds ridiculous but I attended St. Paul's Presbyterian Church, now 'The Space '. I only went to Sunday school and because of the sort of more Puritan Ritual there was no midnight mass as I can remember, and no Nativity scenes or cribs it was very plain. I love the 'smells and bells' of our Church.
The meaning of Nativity actually did come home to me in December 1957..... I was nearly eight and my mother was expecting a baby in January,&nbsp; I was hoping for a grey hound or a shetland pony, and was a bit put out on being told it would either be a little girl or boy, but such is life! On Sunday 22nd December my 42 year old mother went into labour after helping us lay a carpet. My sisters 18 and 16 were out with their boyfriends so dad was stuck with me and nobody to help. Fortunately my sisters came home but weren't much use as birth and sex education had hardly been mentioned at school then - I remember them crying a lot! My sister Joan went to the phone box to call the ambulance but it was foggy and they couldn't find us. My sisters went through our block of flats knocking and asking for help but nobody could help. I sat in the living room while my dear quiet little dad delivered my brother. He was just going to cut the umbilical cord when the ambulance arrived. We always said he could turn his hand to anything but widwifery wasn't normally his forte. Mum had to go into hospital for Christmas and it wasn't as good as normal. It was a bit like the beginning of the Life of Brian but not funny, very scary.
&nbsp;In a way it brought home how Joseph must have felt and I wonder if Mary struggled alone with no help, it still brings me to tears as I write.
Unto us a child is born, unto us a child is given.
Have a lovely Christmas, more in part two. Barbara Liddell

Nativity scene displayed inside a church with stained glass windows.

So much to write about I have divided this opus into two parts, the second part taking in New Year.

Christmas! What a wonderful word, as a child born after WW2, I hadn't experienced the hardship and deprivation of former Christmases with food rat...