A decade after her sister was brutally murdered for her political views, Kim Leadbeater had hoped the country might have turned its back on the hatred and division that took Jo Cox’s life. Instead, the Labour MP says, it has only got worse.
Ten years ago next week, on 16 June 2016, while Britain was locked in Brexit campaigning ahead of the referendum, Cox was shot and stabbed to death in the West Yorkshire village of Birstall, five minutes’ walk from where her younger sister still lives.
She was 41, a mother of two, and had been an MP for just over a year. Her killer, a 53-year-old with links to the National Front , shouted “Britain First” as he attacked her outside the library where she was about to hold a constituency surgery. She was the first sitting British MP to be killed in a quarter of a century.
Shorts
Leadbeater, 50, was a sports teacher and personal trainer when her sister was killed. Despite previously having no interest in standing for public office, she won the Batley and Spen by-election in 202 1 and now represents Spen Valley following boundary changes.
She speaks movingly of her sister’s murder and how her world has never been the same.
Leadbeater had taken her car in for an MOT and was running to collect it – trying to be healthy – when the call came from her sister’s husband, Brendan. All she knew was that Cox had been attacked.
‘You put the grief and trauma together’
“I just started shaking. And I said to the mechanic, ‘Oh, God, something’s happened to my sister.’” She “just knew” instinctively that “things were not good”.
What followed was mostly a blur. “I probably don’t remember a great deal of the next six months, even 12 months, because… your body and your brain find a way of coping. And all I knew was I had to get through this for my mum and dad and for Jo’s kids… And I probably did that for, like, six months, or a year. And to be honest, maybe I’ve been doing that ever since.”
Jo Cox pictured in 2015 (Photo: Yui Mok/PA)
She is candid that the 10th anniversary frightens her for exactly this reason. “I’m a little bit nervous about because I kind of think, well, if this is the moment when I crash and have some sort of meltdown, breakdown, whatever, well, then I’m gonna have to deal with that.”
Around the loss were “many different layers” – the global media attention, the trial, the fact that it was “a politically motivated murder by a fascist”, the two small children left behind, the fact that it happened minutes from her front door.
She has had counselling, and cries, but only occasionally. “I’ve never been a big crier,” she adds. “You put the grief and the trauma together and that is not a healthy cocktail for coping.”
Leadbeater pointedly never names her sister’s killer, refusing to draw attention to him as an individual. But she will, this year, name what he was.
“Jo was murdered because of her political views. This wasn’t a random act. This was a politically motivated murder by a neo-Nazi, right-wing fascist… That’s hard for me to say… it’s one of the things that I sort of push down inside, so I don’t have to deal with it. But it’s true.”
She draws a parallel with David Amess, the Tory MP, murdered by an Islamist extremist in 2021: “We have to call it out for what it is,” she insists.
‘I’m still saying the same things 10 years down the line’
Why does naming it matter so much this year? Because, she argues, you cannot address extremism without being honest that it exists – and without confronting the conditions that feed it.
If people don’t have “a sense of identity and belonging… part of the danger is that they are drawn towards the extremes. So, we have to own that conversation.” She also knocks down a persistent myth, too: that her sister’s killer was mentally ill rather than driven by ideology. “People say that and that is not true,” she says.
The Labour MP and her family have tried to channel their grief into transforming British politics, seizing on Cox’s maiden-speech words – “We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us” – as a mantra to encourage people to reject hatred and division.
Yet when we meet in her Westminster office in the wake of the furore over the Henry Nowak murder, Leadbeater admits they have yet to “extinguish this flame”.
“What I feel really depressed and upset about is that I’ve been giving the same interview for 10 years ,” she says – the same message about uniting the country, bringing communities together and doing politics differently. “I just feel frustrated, upset, angry that I’m still saying those things 10 years down the line.”
She says there have been “brief glimmers of hope” – such as after the murder of Amess – when the country recoiled and said “this isn’t right, this isn’t our country, this isn’t who we are”.
But each time, she says, it proved “short-lived” and “we seem to go back to the division and the anger and, if anything, it gets worse”.
Why worse? She is honest about the genui…
Read the full article at iNews →
United Kingdom