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On October 4, 1936, hundreds of men and women descended on London’s East End to take a stand. They came together to stop Mosley’s Blackshirt fascists marching down Cable Street.

These brave people – black, white, British, European, African, Caribbean – stood up to intolerance and faced down bigotry .

Eighty years to the day, the Home Secretary Amber Rudd stood up in Birmingham to deliver a policy the Blackshirts would have been proud of: Companies would be “named and shamed” for employing too many foreign workers.

Disgraced former minister Liam Fox, brought back by Theresa May to sort international trade deals, said Europeans who live and work over here were a “card” for Brexit negotiations with the EU.

Then May herself said Britain would opt out of part of the European Convention of Human Rights, joining such beacons of democracy like Turkey and Ukraine.

(Image: Getty)

That would be the same convention that was drafted by Conservatives after World War Two to prevent another global conflict, to preserve a person’s right to live and to ban torture.

And on top of that, she confirmed foreign doctors and nurses could stay here only until a British person could be trained up to replace them.

Theresa May made her name for correctly identifying that the Tories had become the “Nasty Party”. She attempted to say Labour had now become it.

But if the kitten heel fits, Theresa, wear it.

Because since she came to power with Cameron in 2010, her ­Government has sought to sow the seeds of division and hate.

(Image: Carl Court/Getty Images)

From the Bedroom Tax to the mass re-testing of disabled people and chronically-ill to cut benefits, they sought to target and stigmatise some of society’s most vulnerable.

Money saved went to subsidise tax cuts for millionaires. May famously signed off the scandalous “Go Home” poster vans, encouraging illegal migrants to leave the country.

And it led to a bitter and divisive European Referendum, the result of which gave the green light for racists and xenophobes to target EU and other migrants.

This week the Council of Europe, which I sit on and which represents human rights, issued a damning report on racism in the UK.

It concluded: “It is no coincidence that racist violence is on the rise in the UK at the same time as we see worrying examples of intolerance and hate speech in the newspapers, online and even among politicians.”

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Is it any wonder UKIP’s leader Diane James resigned after just 18 days? May’s made her redundant. As she saluted the crowd, May’s arm obscured part of the letter E behind her. The slogan read, instead, “a Bitter Tomorrow”.

That’s the change that’s going to come from her. The bitterness of telling a child at 11 they’re a failure.

The bitterness of using people not born in this country as bargaining chips in trade negotiations.

And the bitterness of telling doctors and nurses who save lives every day that they’re only there to backfill until our “own people” can take their jobs.

May’s Britain won’t be a “country that works for everyone”.

(Image: Birmingham Mail)

It’s a Nasty Nation that seeks to unify people by playing to their ­prejudices and, as Corbyn said, “fanning the flames of xenophobia”.

Eighty years after Cable Street, good men and women must once again stand against bigotry and ­intolerance.

Like Mosley, May has no electoral mandate. The difference is these people don’t wear black shirts.

Instead they wear the mantle of Governmental office. And they will only win if we continue to stand back and let them march past us.

It is time for us all to unite and face them down.