Legacy of Jo Cox

Rosie Duffield Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab)]

It is a real pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater) and her incredibly moving maiden speech. That she won her seat on my birthday was a great birthday present.

I was not lucky enough to know Jo or to be able to call her a friend. However, she had a direct effect on my life that I would love to be able to thank her for in person. We all remember where we were when we heard the terrible news that day, the shock and disbelief, and watching the news over and over, hoping that the headline would somehow change, and desperately willing for it not to be true. A few months later, there was an announcement at the Labour party conference that one of Jo’s legacies would be to help women like me—members of the party who wanted to progress as councillors or activists, or maybe even one day follow in her footsteps and stand to be an MP. The Jo Cox women in leadership scheme was launched. I applied—at midnight on deadline day, as always—and did not expect to hear anything back, but at least I had tried.

Fast-forward a couple more months and there was a little bit of a buzz on social media: women I knew of had started to talk about checking their inboxes. It emerged that a couple of thousand women had applied for about 50 places. There was no way on earth that I was going to get one of them. So my poor mum was on the verge of calling an ambulance when she got a snotty, sobbing and totally incoherent phone call from her daughter, who had found an email from Labour Women’s Network in her spam folder with an offer of a place in the scheme. Women like me—a nobody struggling to raise my boys while working part-time as a teaching assistant and filling every other minute with running my local branch of the Labour party—do not often get breaks like that. It was my Charlie Bucket moment; I had found my golden ticket.

Jo’s gift to me was a group of women from across the UK: 55 sisters, all with different strengths, backgrounds and experiences, and all with different reasons for applying to the scheme. I have made lifelong friendships with some incredibly special women, all of whom have made an impact. We had had just two of our training sessions when the snap election was announced in 2017. I had sat with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) in a hotel bar and told her I was thinking I might practise standing as an MP in 2020 in an area that she knew well. We joked that it was never, ever in a million years possible for Canterbury to be anything other than the safest Conservative seat in England. So, with absolutely nothing to lose, I practised standing in 2017, with that brilliant group of women on my phone 24/7. Ten of those women stood for Parliament in 2017, and two of us got here: the first woman ever to represent Canterbury and the first Sikh woman ever to be elected, my hon. Friend—my great friend—the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill).

Those other women have all kept making a difference, too, in continuing to stand for Parliament and in becoming councillors, community leaders, leaders of non-governmental organisations, activists, union pioneers and women on the frontline of the public sector and the fight against the covid pandemic. They are women such as Michelle Langan, who leads the Paper Cup Project in Liverpool to help to change the lives of rough sleepers in her region; Dr Kindy Sandhu, Coventry City councillor, academic extraordinaire and activist; Caroline Penn, formidable former Brighton councillor; Dr Allison Gardner, AI ceiling breaker as a leading woman in a traditionally male strand of academia; Denise Christie, firefighter and a regional secretary of the Fire Brigades Union; Anna Smith, deputy leader of Cambridge City Council; Salma Arif, the first female British Asian health lead on Leeds City Council; and our much-missed sister Assia Shah, who we sadly lost at the end of last year while she was working as a hospital chaplain and caring for those with covid.

I wish I could read the names of all those women—not just some in the first cohort of the scheme with me, but the outstanding women I have met who continue to inspire and change lives for the better in their communities and the wider world. All of us owe our thanks to Jo not just for the incredible opportunity her legacy has given us, but for the lead she took and the work she did for humanitarian causes around the world and for the women who undoubtedly would be worse off if she had not shone a light on their needs.

I was inspired by Jo’s passionate commitment to stop Brexit and by her humanity and compassion for displaced people seeking asylum. I am certain that she would stand here today and make her views heard on the idea of sending people in boats back to direct harm. Jo talked about what we have in common, and that is something that inspires me every single day of my life. One thing I have in common with Jo is our friendship with my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle), who has always been a great support—an encourager, a joker and a fantastic ally. Thanks to him for securing this debate today so that we can remember Jo and thank her for the real difference she brought to so many lives.