Jo Cox’s murder prompted calls for a ‘kinder, gentler politics’. Why has intolerance prevailed?

Riot police clash with anti-migration protesters outside an asylum hotel in Rotherham in 2024. Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Riot police clash with anti-migration protesters outside an asylum hotel in Rotherham in 2024. Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images Jo Cox’s murder prompted calls for a ‘kinder, gentler politics’. Why has intolerance prevailed? The late MP’s family, politicians and academics on the factors they believe have heightened division in the last 10 years How the murder of my sister changed Britain – podcast Ten years on from Jo Cox’s murder, Kim Leadbeater fears that the consensus around “kinder, gentler politics” in the wake of her sister’s death was short-lived. “Sadly and regrettably, over the last decade things are worse,” she says. Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen and mother of two young children, was murdered outside a library in West Yorkshire in June 2016 by an English nationalist. In the aftermath of Cox’s killing, the then Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn , issued the call for “a kinder and gentler politics”, echoed by then prime minister David Cameron’s call to “drive out” intolerance. Just hours before Cox was killed, Nigel Farage unveiled the infamous “breaking point” poster – depicting Syrian refugees lining up at a European border, cementing the politics of scapegoating and fear into the Brexit referendum campaign. A decade on, intolerance appears to have prevailed. Police are encouraged to disclose ethnicity and nationality of some offenders, and Britain 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 was described by some as a celebration of Britishness, and others as 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, amid fears for his life, after showing his pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in an RE lesson. Parents of Jo Cox say politics more ‘toxic’ since daughter’s death Read more Rob Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University, believes “a kinder, gentler politics” was always a vain hope. He believes Brexit “accelerated rather than created” the deeper forces driving populism. “There’s no centrist position on prejudice,” he said, arguing that where postwar politics of class and economics allowed for compromise, politics built around identity and values tends toward absolutism. This produces “increasingly extreme definitions