Jo Cox, MP

On 16th June, 2016, in her constituency - and home town - of Birstall (Batley & Spen). Jo Cox was murdered. The most common photo in the media showed her wearing the hijab ....

She wears the hijab with a natural ease ...

Surprise and delight in her face,

Surrounded, uplifted and strengthened by difference

Of gender, religion and race ...

With embedded conviction and practised belief

That our lives are lived ‘better together’;

A woman of substance, a sign-post of hope

To a world with a common endeavour.

A flowering life has been brutally ended ....

A senselessly hate-driven killing:

But lives such as Jo’s are ‘above and beyond’,

And already her death is distilling

A sense of the future she worked to secure

As she lived out these words every day:

“We have more in common than that which divides us.”

This piece appeared in the Guardian in June 2016.

Every morning I wake up to a photo of Jo Cox. It is from the moment at my wedding when confetti was thrown. She is in the middle of the frame – in the thick of it as always, grinning at the joy of others, hands clasped in the encouraging applause which was her physical default. The morning afterwards, as others nursed their whisky haze and considered their journey home through Scotland’s January snow, fearless, tiny Jo climbed a Munro and sent a photo of a congratulations message she’d carved into the ice at the top.

The year before she had shared dinner and drinks with a group of women from all over the world. She told a story about being a girl who was too shy to call anybody to find out how to get from her home village to Leeds. She managed it in the end, because somebody put an arm round her shoulder and said, “Of course you can do it, I know you can.” She was reflecting that everything she’d ever achieved since had happened after encouragement like that and asked us to do that for one another and for other women. Through her work with women candidates for political office and other campaigners I watched her do it again and again. Half holding you upright, half shoving you forward. That’s what it meant to have Jo’s arm around your shoulder.

Much has already been written about Jo’s many identities. Our friend Jo was a forceful feminist, unwavering humanitarian and relentless campaigner – for the people of Syria, to stop women dying in childbirth just because they were too poor to have the care of a midwife, to embrace the stranger and make refugees welcome.

In itself, this is an inspiration for all of us to do and be better. But for me the revelation of Jo’s life was not just what she did, but the how she did it. Jo believed in the power of common action, never just asking, “What do you think?”, but “How should we do it?”. In her mind there was no question that could not be answered in working together.

“#JoCoxMP was killed because of her political views”: Brandan Cox https://t.co/vZcw64fypd

“#JoCoxMP was killed because of her political views”: Brandan Cox https://t.co/vZcw64fypd

“We have far more in common than that which divides us” Jo Cox 1974-2016

New graffiti in Moseley today

Two vigils

// It’s been such a desperately sad week. It’s incredibly hard to know what to say in the face of the dark and ugly side of politics and the absolutely awful impact that has unfolded in the last few days.

When I taught Trade Union Equality Reps, I always spent time discussing  Allport’s Scale of prejudice. The lower end of the scale starts with antilocution or ‘speaking against’. We spend a lot of time in the trade union movement trying to tackle this, especially in workplaces but it is widely derided as being ‘too politically correct’. So what if a joke or a bit of banter is a bit sexist, why can’t we criticise people from other cultures, why do people get offended if we say something is a bit ‘gay’?

It’s important because language is the foundation upon which we express our attitudes, it’s how we frame the world and creative narratives about ourselves and each other. It’s important because we don’t just talk. We act, and we act according to what we believe in, or within the bounds of what we know is acceptable to express. What is or isn’t acceptable is rooted in the language we use.

When language is consistently negative and biased, it perpetuates itself and it creates an environment where it becomes ok to target and attack with words, groups who we have framed as scapegoats. Who are the groups that are scapegoated? Invariably the least powerful in society. Disabled people, poor people, migrants. The bankers and tax avoiders haven’t suffered much.

Antilocution moves onto avoidance and discrimination. People are treated as other, as somehow less than human, or as deviants. Then this escalates into physical attack and extermination. But it starts with words.

Maybe as a union movement and as the broad left in the political spectrum we haven’t been very effective at answering the ‘why not’ questions. Yet still, the level of disrespect and hatred that has been building has astounded me.

In 2011 we went to the polls twice in Wales. Elections and a referendum. I worked on the two campaigns; the positive and energetic Yes campaign for devolution of further powers to Wales and a fairly positive Welsh Assembly election campaign. Forward five years and the Welsh Assembly elections had an entirely different feel, it was certainly tougher. I wasn’t prepared for the ugliness of the exchanges in this referendum though.

It is part of a wider pattern. We’ve seen far right parties rise in popularity across Europe, we’ve seen Trump gather the crowds with hateful rhetoric in the US. We are de-sensitised to seeing people kill others elsewhere in the world on the basis of not agreeing with their beliefs.

We forget that we are hugely privileged to live in a country where we can disagree and still live alongside each other. Perhaps that is part of the shock that has hit so many of us following the murder of Jo Cox MP. A number of friends of mine knew her personally and their grief at the loss of a good friend and amazing colleague is palpable. Collectively, we’ve lost more than that. We’ve lost the assurance that we usually walk around with; that of our basic safety and the right to be alive no matter what opinions we hold and no matter who we are.

The hate talk and the poisonous brand of politics that has been bubbling up has spilled beyond antilocution and has brutally taken lives. You can only dance on the edge of an abyss for so long before you fall in. People were murdered for just being themselves in Orlando and a shining star of a woman was killed right on our doorstep for challenging hatred and discrimination.