Jo Cox's legacy A decade on, what happened to kinder, gentler politics?

Ten years on from Jo Cox’s murder, Kim Leadbeater fears that the consensus around “kinder, gentler politics” after her sister’s death was short-lived.

- Chris Ohruh

In the aftermath of Cox’s killing, the then Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, issued the call for “a kinder and gentler politics”, echoed by prime minister David Cameron’s call to “drive out” intolerance.

Just hours before Cox was killed, Nigel Farage unveiled the “breaking point” poster - one depicting a group of mostly Syrian refugees lining up at a European border, cementing the politics of scapegoating and fear into the Brexit referendum campaign.

A decade on, intolerance appears to have prevailed. Police are encouraged to disclose the ethnicity and nationality of some offenders, and Britain braces for far-right unrest whenever they are not white.

After Henry Nowak was murdered by a Sikh man in Southampton, with police having dismissed his dying pleas for help, Farage called for “pure, cold rage”. Rioting followed. Later, racist mobs burned people out of their homes in Belfast.

Last summer, protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers were persistent, while St George’s flags were hoisted from windows, bridges and lamp-posts in what was described by some as a celebration of Britishness, and others as an aggressive symbol of anti-immigration sentiment.

In 2021, the Conservative MP David Amess was murdered by an Islamic State sympathiser. The same year, a teacher from Batley Grammar school - in Jo Cox’s old constituency - went into hiding, amid fears for his life, after showing his pupils a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in an RE lesson.

Rob Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, says he believes “a kinder, gentler politics” was always a vain hope. He thinks Brexit “accelerated rather than created” the deeper forces that are driving populism.