Kim Leadbeater's desk is overflowing with paperwork. She has just treated her staff to fish and chips, and she is fizzing with energy. Yet the Spen Valley Labour MP describes her parliamentary role as a "job I didn't want". Her sister Jo Cox was murdered outside her constituency surgery in Birstall 10 years ago today, in the run-up to the EU referendum. The attack was carried out by an English nationalist.
The day Jo was murdered began in a "normal" way for Kim. She had taken her car in for an MOT, before heading out for a run. "I got the phone call to say what happened and I don't remember a great deal after that, other than I started shaking," Kim says. "Probably the next six months, maybe 12 months, after that is something of a blur because I went into autopilot. I knew I had to look after my mum and dad. I knew I had to be strong for Jo's children and for the whole family."
“Kim Leadbeater says intolerance worse a decade after Jo Cox's murder by a far-right extremist.”
In the aftermath of Cox's killing, the then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called for "a kinder and gentler politics", echoed by then prime minister David Cameron's call to "drive out" intolerance. But just hours before Cox was killed, Nigel Farage unveiled the infamous "breaking point" poster – depicting Syrian refugees at a European border, cementing the politics of scapegoating and fear into the Brexit referendum campaign.
A decade on, Kim fears that consensus was short-lived. "Sadly and regrettably, over the last decade things are worse," she says. Rob Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University, believes "a kinder, gentler politics" was always a vain hope. He says Brexit "accelerated rather than created" the deeper forces driving populism.
The deterioration is visible across Britain. Police are encouraged to disclose ethnicity and nationality of some offenders, and the country braces for far-right unrest whenever they are not white. After Henry Nowak was murdered by a Sikh man in Southampton as police dismissed Nowak's dying plea 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 some called a celebration of Britishness, and others 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 Cox's old constituency – went into hiding after showing his pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed from Charlie Hebdo in an RE lesson.
Kim remembers the support that followed Jo's murder as "a comfort blanket that kept us going". "In the face of the very worst of humanity was the very best of humanity," she says. But she now warns against people being pushed "towards the extremes". For a town that still remembers the day – Ian Thompson, who worked at paints firm PPG, recalls being told to stay behind because of a murder in Birstall – the question lingers: has Britain learned the lessons of that June day?