Jo Cox MP

Lord Kinnock Excerpts

Monday 20th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kinnock (Lab)]

My Lords, I express my gratitude and that of my colleagues for the tributes that have come from all sides of the House to Jo Cox, and say also to those who have not voiced their sympathy this afternoon that we do understand that it is none the less deeply and sincerely felt.

For 20 years I knew and cherished Jo Cox as a friend and as a young woman of great personal and political vivaciousness. In life she was brilliant in all respects and her death was appalling in its ugly brutality and dreadful injustice. As I reeled from horrified shock at hearing what had happened to Jo, I confess that I felt misery mixed with hatred: hatred for whoever had terrified and killed her; hatred for the times and the conditions which had made someone feel that they were justified in being brutally extreme. Then I realised that my outrage was useless. Not for the first time I recognised that hate cannot be beaten with hatred. Jo Cox would have said, “Do not hate in my name”. She might even have quoted Gandhi: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”. Then she would have offered a brave, rational response to the malicious incoherence of an environment in which a minority of people think they can write, speak and do violence to anyone if they have the excuse of enthusiasm, offence, partisanship, or even a warped form of patriotism.

Jo’s response would not have lacked passion. She was pragmatic in order to get things done, but never cold nor clinical. This spirited woman would have centred on realism and been driven by rationality. She would have pursued the cause of the rage and then put bold ideas into action to counter it. We know that, because that is what she always did when confronted by inhumanity, bigotry, injustice or simply by the needs of her constituents. Now we who are part of the reasonable majority must employ truth against divisive fiction and distortion; reality against prejudice; hard-headed common sense against delusion. We have to combat hatred in its lethal public forms, in the bilious preaching of demagogues, in the sly dog-whistles of populists, and when it oozes as a cowardly, anonymous social media secretion.

Impressionable, maladjusted individuals may claim that their responsibility is diminished; politicians and newspapers with voices that shape views may not. We have to fight hatred that is incited and nourished by those whose purposes are served by fostering fear—fear of change, fear of insecurity and fear of foreigners. That is our duty, not simply to ourselves but to our democracy and the British people’s sense of decency. We cannot allow venom to displace mutual respect. We cannot permit intolerance to intimidate tolerance. We cannot accept that a convention of hating can ever be allowed to prevail over the greatest, strongest, most civilised British quality of live and let live.

History teaches in too many lessons that if temperate rationality concedes ground, the space is invaded by intemperate irrationality, always with horrific results. That is why we and all who recoil from the politics of hate must never make that concession. We must never stop confronting those who seek political profit from encouraging the neuroses of threat and resentment. Young Jo Cox did not concede. That is why her short life was so productive, so radiant. It deserves to be unforgotten because it was unforgettable.

House adjourned at 3.34 pm.