Fine words from our MPs, but the best tribute to Jo Cox will be actions
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Version 0 of 1. Two roses marked the terrible empty space on the Commons benches where Jo Cox should have been; one white for Yorkshire, one red for Labour. But the hole she leaves in many lives feels so much harder to fill. Today MPs paid tribute to a fallen colleague. People will say what happened was parliament at its best – serious, dignified, passionate yet unpartisan – but the truth is that this was hardly parliament at all. For just over an hour it became a church in all but name, and the debate a public memorial service. The benches were a sea of mourning black, interspersed with the suffragette colours of green, white and purple; Jeremy Corbyn opened proceedings with a sermon as gentle and avuncular as a Shropshire vicar’s. He and Cox weren’t natural soulmates – different generations, backgrounds and strands of Labour – but it was to her kindness that Corbyn naturally responded. She had believed, he said, not just in loving her neighbour but her neighbour’s neighbour; and more than that, “she saw a world of neighbours”, a belief underpinning everything she worked for. The Labour leader’s familiar promise of a “kinder, gentler politics” suddenly took on a new undeniable force. “We all have a responsibility,” he concluded, “not to whip up hate or sow division.” Amen to that. And that was almost as close as Labour MPs came to drawing explicit political lessons, which must have taken some restraint on the day Nigel Farage was back out defending his loathsome Brexit poster with its snaking queue of refugees. Stephen Kinnock, a longstanding family friend, skirted closest by warning that she would have been outraged by the poster because “Jo understood that rhetoric has consequences”, that if you light a fuse an explosion is likely to follow. But with her two motherless little children, their father Brendan and their grandparents watching from the public gallery, it was the personal not the political to which MPs most often returned. Rachel Reeves, who has known Brendan since they were students, laughed out loud as she recalled tipsily convivial evenings on board the Coxes’ houseboat. And then she broke down in tears as she tried to say that Batley and Spen could find a new MP, but “no one can replace a mother”. Barry Sheerman, the veteran Huddersfield MP, spoke fiercely of the house needing to “watch over that family” for years to come. But it was Labour’s Harriet Harman who drew the personal and political together when she talked about Cox arriving for a meeting with her newborn baby, unable to stop herself kissing the child all the way through; about how Cox’s “maternal heart” and her political heart were not separate, but intertwined. The word her friends kept reaching for, in speech after speech, was “love”. After a week so disfigured by hate, it is the one word everyone perhaps needed to hear. And if the talk of rival MPs sitting together didn’t quite come to pass, they came together in spirit. David Cameron recalled meeting Cox a decade ago in Darfur, when she was an aid worker and he was leading a party she loathed but was nonetheless willing to meet him if it served those she was trying to help. But he deftly sketched in her daredevil side too, the one that once abseiled – pregnant and suffering from morning sickness – down a mountain peak called the Inaccessible Pinnacle. Here was a rounded portrait of a women who was compassionate but no simpering saint: a tough, resilient woman of action. Stephen Doughty, the Cardiff MP who had worked with her at Oxfam, fondly admitted to being “a bit in awe of her” and did a brilliant job of explaining exactly why. She wasn’t just admirable, she was formidable, a boss who once told him off for doing too much “touchy feely” talking instead of devising a plan. Cox knew it wasn’t enough just to wring your hands, it’s what you do that counts. When the shock of her death wears off, Westminster will have to remember that. It’s not enough just to talk about standing up for something better, resisting cheap shots, draining the hatred from politics. It’s what you do about it that counts. |