Five and zero helium balloons slowly deflate in Kim Leadbeater’s parliamentary office – a fading reminder of her 50th birthday weekend in Harrogate. But for the Labour MP for Spen Valley, the numbers carry a heavier weight: ten years since her sister Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right extremist.
Six weeks before that June day in 2016, Jo had been the star guest at Kim’s 40th party, arriving late from Parliament in a neon tutu for an 80s fancy dress weekend in North Yorkshire. “We had so much fun that weekend,” Kim recalls. “Jo wasn’t an MP, she was just Jo. We sang ‘I Know Him So Well’, our karaoke song, together.”
“Kim Leadbeater says far-right violence has worsened a decade after her sister Jo Cox's murder.”
Then, on 16 June 2016, Jo was killed while holding a constituency surgery in a library in the community she and Kim grew up in. The family had been watching the England-Wales Euros game; moments later they were plunged into a nightmare. “I haven’t been able to grieve,” Kim says now, ten years on. “We just had to keep going forward, through the pain of it, through the trial. I needed to be there for my parents and for Jo’s kids. Even now I think, if I stop to grieve I might just fall apart.”
For a decade, Kim and her family have channelled their loss into the ‘More In Common’ message, spreading love through campaigns like The Great Get Together. But this tenth anniversary feels different. In June 2026, two acts of gross violence have been ruthlessly exploited by far-right agitators, Kim warns: families hunted by race in Belfast, racist attacks in Glasgow, and frightened families in Southampton after orchestrated violence.
“When Jo was killed, it should have been the end – and the start of something different,” she says. “And for a moment it felt like that might be the case. But at this moment things are worse than ever. Believe me, I really do understand anger. But we all have a choice as to what you do with that anger. It would be really easy for me to want to hate every individual who looked like the individual who took my sister’s life. I chose not to do that because that act was his and his alone.”
Kim, a former fitness instructor who stepped into Jo’s shoes as MP five years after the murder, now sits in an office at Portcullis House – the same building where she remembers Jo tearing through the corridors after being elected in 2015. “Every day is awful without Jo,” she says. “The tenth anniversary will be no different.” But this year, as the balloons lose air, her warning is stark: do not let anger push people towards the extremes.