Jo Cox was a popular labour MP in Britain who’d been in the job just over a year.
Married with two children, she stood for diversity and inclusion and had been campaigning for the ‘remain’ vote regarding the upcoming referendum on whether Britain will stay or leave the European Union.
She was murdered in broad daylight on a West Yorkshire street overnight, allegedly by a man who yelled ‘Britain First’ as he shot her – which is also the name of an right-wing, anti-Islam and anti-immigration group (which has since denied any link to the murder).
It’s a shocking crime on the other side of the world that has many of us talking today, wondering how and why this can happen to a woman who was simply going about her job.
Most of us in Australia will probably have known little about Cox, but what we’re learning is that she was a woman who wasn’t afraid to use her voice. Described as a “rising star” by Prime Minister David Cameron, she’d made passionate declarations for diversity in Yorkshire, founded and chaired the All-Party Parliamentary Group Friends of Syria, chaired the Labour Women’s Network, and became known as a campaigner for Syrian refugees. The first in her family to attend university, she studied at Cambridge University and later the London School of Economics, before starting her career as a Labour adviser and later working with Oxfam in developing countries as an aid worker.
“Our community has been deeply enhanced by immigration,” she said in her Maiden speech. “Whilst we celebrate our diversity the thing that surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.”
In a statement released by her husband, Cox was described as being a woman who believed and fought for a better world. She had an energy and zest for life that would exhaust most people, he said.
“She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn’t have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous.”
He also tweeted a photo of his wife next to the houseboat they shared on the Thames.
— Brendan Cox (@MrBrendanCox) June 16, 2016
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said his Party was in deep shock: “Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy.”
Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton also released a statement, noting Cox’s maiden speech that celebrated diversity and expressing her horror at the event. “It is cruel and terrible that her life was cut short by a violent act of political intolerance.”
US presidential contender Hillary Clinton’s statement on ‘cruel and terrible assassination’ of British MP Jo Cox. pic.twitter.com/bzCbbaunrW
— James Cook (@BBCJamesCook) June 16, 2016
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has also sent his condolences, while Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said it’s a shocking hate crime and that he feels for her family and kids. “I can’t imagine going through what her family is going through,” he told ABC radio.
Cox’s maiden speech is particularly difficult to watch – witnessing her full passion and energy for celebrating all the things that “unite us”. As the Guardian says in its powerful tribute to Cox, she was driven by an ideal to bring people together:
What nobler vision can there be than that of a society where people can be comfortable in their difference? And what more fundamental tenet of decency is there than to put first and to cherish all that makes us human, as opposed to what divides one group from another?
This is a shocking and tragic crime – one that saw the UK’s own ‘Counting Dead Women’ having to adjust their figures to 57 UK women killed by male violence this year.
Cox was a woman with a brilliant vision, trying to create a better world. For that she is now dead.
Jo Cox MP, 41, was shot and stabbed. Thomas/Tommy Mair, 52, has been arrested in relation to her death. pic.twitter.com/roXEI7h5ly
— CountingDeadWomen (@CountDeadWomen) June 16, 2016