Some Thoughts on The Assassination of Jo Cox MP

In the wake of the horrific murder of Jo Cox MP, I wrote the following on Facebook - I include the FB-specific introduction, even though it is irrelevant to this blog, as it provides a context for the way I phrased the piece overall...


Some Thoughts on The Assassination of Jo Cox MP

Before I start, a warning: This Post Contains Politics.

Various friends of mine know that, in general, I avoid discussing politics on Facebook. I regard it as a forum for entertainment and am well aware that my political and social views conflict with those of some of my friends. As the old adage goes, “Never discuss Politics or Religion at dinner parties.” That maxim applies equally to Facebook, as far as I’m concerned.

However, so sickened and depressed am I by today’s events that I feel compelled to break that self-imposed embargo. If you have an allergy to my views, and those of you who know me personally will be very well aware of my stance on the EU Referendum, then look away now. If you continue to read on and are offended by what I have to say, I can only not apologise. Yes, you read that correctly, it was not a typo, I do NOT apologise. I do, however, apologise for the length of this comment...

For me as a gay Englishman, the last week has been harrowing. First there was the horrific massacre of forty nine gay revellers in Orlando, Florida. For obvious reasons, this upset me deeply. Now, in Britain, MY homeland, we have seen the assassination of the Labour MP Jo Cox, a prominent campaigner for Britain to Remain in the EU.

The assassination of Jo Cox - and I use the term ‘assassination’ rather than ‘murder’ quite deliberately for reasons I shall clarify in due course - is undoubtedly the most shocking single event in recent British political history. Her career, first in charity and latterly in politics where she was intensely concerned with the plight of refugees, seems to me to symbolise the best in Britain. By a morbid symmetry, her killer, Thomas Mair, a neo-Nazi who subscribed to a South African white supremacist magazine, symbolises the worst. His cry of “Britain First!” as he shot Jo Cox three times and stabbed her repeatedly with a foot-long knife may have been merely a slogan, or it may have been specifically invoking the fascist Britain First political party, but it scarcely matters which.

In using those words during his frenzied attack, he clearly aligned himself with the most rancid elements of the Far Right. And they have taken his words and actions and run with them. Far Right Facebook and Twitter feeds are awash with sympathisers praising him, revelling in Jo Cox’s death, and advocating the targeting of others, including the Labour Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.

And let us not forget that in May, when Sadiq Khan’s victory over the Tory candidate for London Mayor, Zac Goldsmith, was announced (a triumph, incidentally, over some of the most noxious dog-whistle anti-Muslim campaigning in recent memory, courtesy of that revolting Australian hate-monger Lynton Crosby), the leader of Britain First, Paul Golding, who had stood as his party’s candidate for Mayor, turned his back on Khan. Soon after, Britain First made blow-hard noises about carrying out ‘militant direct action’ against Khan and his supporters wherever they live, work and pray. Couple this with Britain First’s ‘activist training camp’ in Wales, where they practice ‘knife defence’, and the assassination of Jo Cox now places those words and activities in a far more sinister light.

Now, in trying to find a term to describe this atrocity, the Scottish writer Charles Stross made the following point in an argument on Twitter:

“Assassination is a base name for a base act. Calling it murder implicitly lets [the] killer’s fellow-travelers off the hook.”

And he is surely correct, which I why I stress that Cox’s killing was an assassination. A murder is a singular event carried out by an individual. It may carry little context beyond that, it may not. But an assassination is a very specific political act in a very specific political context, in this case that of a neo-Nazi invoking the name of a fascist party against the backdrop of an increasingly bitter and febrile political atmosphere in which certain elements are exploiting the public’s fears and stoking xenophobia for their own ends. Britain First cannot evade some responsibility.

Neither can the Brexiteers wholly evade some degree of moral culpability. Not just during this EU Referendum campaign, though of course it is far more concentrated and ubiquitous at the moment, but for years so-called Eurosceptics have fed the public misinformation, half-truths and lies, stoking anti-EU resentment, promoting mistrust and fear of foreigners. They’ve encouraged and exploited a Little Englander mentality, telling the public, for example, that if only we left the EU we could seal our borders and cut immigration down to a fraction of what it is now, omitting to say that over half of net immigration is currently from non-EU countries anyway, over which we could be as draconian as we wish. When you spend years telling people that the country’s going down the tubes because of ‘Them from over there’, don’t be surprised at the nasty atmosphere you’ve created.

And to those who claim that both sides - Remain and Leave - are morally equivalent, as both lie and exaggerate as much as each other to bolster their respective cases, I say this: you are hopelessly misguided. Those of us who wish the UK to Remain in the EU clearly regard the Brexiteers as wrong. We may call them names. We may say they are naive, or deluded, or gullible. We may even say they are idiots. But we do not go around describing them as ‘Traitors’, a vicious, loaded term often used against Remainers by the more extreme Leavers. The sinister implications of such a word are too obvious for me to elaborate. After all, how does one punish traitors...?

Now, whilst Remain may exaggerate, may even lie, the worst of those lies (“Your pension may go down, prices may go up, the value of your house may fall” etc.) are not even in the same moral universe as the half-truths and lies of the Brexiteers, who have consistently played the Xenophobia Card. Earlier today, before the appalling attack on Jo Cox, Ukip unveiled their latest poster. Reproducing a photograph of a massive queue of refugees at some unidentified EU border snaking away into the far distance with the slogan BREAKING POINT splashed over in lurid upper case letters, it was straight out of the Josef Goebbels Book of Marketing. And I don’t say that lightly or facetiously, as it exactly mirrors Nazi propaganda from the 1930s. At that point, I felt that the EU Referendum campaign had reached a new low. And then Jo Cox was assassinated.

Now, before I’m deluged with complaints from thin-skinned Leavers that I’m accusing them of racism, let me say that I do NOT believe that all Brexiteers are racists. But you can be damn sure that ALL racists are Brexiteers. Britain First are Brexiteers sans pareil, for example. The Venn Diagram describing ‘Racists’ and ‘Brexiteers’ isn’t even a proper Venn Diagram - the circle marked Racists is firmly and wholly encompassed by the larger circle marked Brexiteers.

So no, don’t you dare try to tell me with a straight face that the Remain and Leave campaigns are morally equivalent.

And to those gay friends of mine who back Leave I say this: the right-wing neo-liberal snake-oil salesmen who have sold Brexit to you no more give a damn about your rights as an LGBT person than they give a damn about the poor bastards fleeing war zones or crushing poverty and trying to escape to a better life - or, indeed, simply life itself - in this country. Sure, the Tories threw us the bone of equal marriage, because senior party officials realised they were on the wrong side of history - but even then Cameron had to bully his party into backing him, and many Tory MPs rebelled and voted against it and bitterly resent him to this day.

Meanwhile, for many years the EU has quietly and systematically passed legislation in favour of equal rights for LGBT people across the continent. To quote Kevin Maxwell writing in The Independent on 25th March this year:

“In all member states sexual activity between those of the same-sex is legal, and discrimination in employment for example has been banned since 2000. This means, Europe has been protecting our rights as gay people for over 15 years.”

What was Boris Johnson doing in 2000? Still justifying Thatcher’s Section 28! Later, he wrote that “gay marriage could lead to three men and a dog getting married.” As for Farage and Ukip, don’t make me laugh. Tedious golf-club fascists who think a woman’s place is in the kitchen and a gay’s place is nowhere near the kids. Do you really think such people, who for years either never gave a damn about LGBT issues or even positively acted against our interests, can now suddenly be trusted to run a post-EU Britain that is not shaped solely in THEIR interests, many of which are utterly inimical to those of ordinary (i.e. not rich and privileged) people, gay and straight?

The Britain they want is a throwback to the days of Empire, a Britain where everybody knew their place, with minimal workers’ rights, damn-all welfare provision, no universal free healthcare, a nasty mean-minded society riven by fear, paranoia, and insecurity, a Land Fit For Thomas Mair, and you can bet your last pound that YOUR place in their vision will be at the bottom of the heap, with them standing at the summit.

The Brexiteers have sown the seeds of fear, paranoia and xenophobia. Jo Cox is the first bitter fruit of that harvest. We can only hope that the crop now fails and withers in the field, but I fear that it will not.

A Pandora’s Box has been opened, the contents of which will continue to poison British society long after June 23rd.