Meeting of the Parliament 16 June 2026 [Draft]
I thank members from all six parties who added their support to the motion and helped secure tonight’s debate.
I want to start by recognising that, first and foremost, Jo Cox was a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother, and my thoughts are very much with her family, for whom I am sure that 16 June will always be a difficult day. Loss does not diminish with the passing of time. In recent weeks, I have been in touch with Jo’s sister Kim, and I conveyed my deepest condolences and very best wishes to the family. I hope that this debate will be a fitting tribute from this place in Jo’s memory.
Jo Cox’s career was defined by her humanitarian work, whether at Oxfam—as head of policy and advocacy in the United Kingdom, which included working on the make poverty history campaign, and later as head of Oxfam International’s humanitarian campaigns in New York—or in the UK Parliament, where she established the friends of Syria all-party parliamentary group and advocated for the Syrian people and an end to the civil war. Fittingly, her final questions in Parliament focused on protecting children in conflict.
On 16 June 2016, Jo was shot and stabbed outside a library in her Batley and Spen constituency, where she was due to hold a surgery. Her death shocked the nation, and tributes to her poured in. In the aftermath of her death, changes were made to better ensure the safety of MPs and their staff, with enhanced security measures for MPs and changes to how surgeries were advertised and conducted.
Then, in 2021, Sir David Amess MP was tragically killed while conducting a constituency surgery. My thoughts are with Sir David’s family today, too. There is certainly more to be done to protect elected representatives and their staff, while also recognising the risks inherent in aspects of the job that we all do and in many of the public-facing jobs in our society.
The Jo Cox Foundation was established by Jo’s friends and family after her death, to champion the ideals that Jo spent her working life fighting for. Through the Jo Cox civility commission, the foundation works to create a safe and respectful democracy by challenging the abuse and intimidation of elected representatives. In February, the commission published the report “A Renewed Call to Action for the Devolved Nations”, and I encourage members across the chamber to read its findings.
The foundation also advocates for building stronger communities through the great get together, an annual celebration that sees communities across the UK coming together for a range of events, from park runs and litter picking to picnics. I will be hosting a great get together event next Tuesday lunchtime here in the Parliament, and I hope to see many members there.
Jo was also a powerful advocate for women’s involvement in our labour movement, serving as chair of the Labour Women’s Network from 2011 to 2015. The Jo Cox women in leadership programme is a mentoring and training programme for women in the Labour Party that was established in memory of Jo to continue that important work alongside the Labour Women’s Network, and I am pleased to say that graduates of the programme include my Scottish Labour colleagues Katherine Sangster and Carol Mochan. As a result of the programme, hundreds of Labour women have stood for election, led in their communities and campaigned for change. I cannot think of a more fitting legacy than that for a woman such as Jo.
In the days leading up to this debate, many people have asked whether our political discourse has improved in the decade since Jo’s death. I believe that, if anything, our politics has become more divided, and more entrenched as us versus them. In his book, “Why We’re Polarized”, the American commentator and journalist Ezra Klein explains how political affiliation in America has become one of many signifiers of identity or belonging that are stacked on top of so many others that to cross sides from one party to the other becomes virtually impossible.
Although our political context might be quite different from that of the United States, it strikes me that the growing prominence of identity politics in our country—of tribes, teams and groups—has hardened those dividing lines. People become not just politically opposed, but “enemies”, “traitors” and “threats to society”. The growing influence of social media—and of the bad actors who control and manipulate those platforms—has certainly fuelled the culture of outrage and conflict that dominates public discourse and media today.