Meeting of the Parliament 16 June 2026 [Draft]
I thank Jenny Young for lodging the motion and for the chance, on the 10th anniversary of Jo Cox’s death, to allow ourselves a moment of pause. Grief is a drowning heaviness. It is also, I believe, something that warrants action. Before I get to the rest of tonight’s debate, it is worth being specific about what we are marking today.
Jo Cox’s record was wider than the one line that we often quote on the anniversary of her death, that
“we are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.”
In her maiden speech, in June 2015, she said:
“Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration”.—[Official Report, House of Commons, 3 June 2015; Vol 596, c 675.]
In April 2016, backing Lord Dubs’s amendment on child refugees, she said:
“Who can blame desperate parents for wanting to escape the horror”?—[Official Report, House of Commons, 25 April 2016; Vol 596, c 1235.]
She helped to write a 2015 Labour friends of Palestine report calling for the Gaza blockade to be lifted. In February 2016, she opposed curbs on boycotting Israeli firms over the occupation, saying that
“It is our right to boycott unethical companies.”
As other members have noted, she was the chair of the Labour Women’s Network and is remembered for saying that she had gone into politics partly because only 23 per cent of the House of Commons was female. On 3 February 2016, she signed an early day motion marking LGBT history month and welcomed the legal gains of the past two decades.
None of that represents the soft, safe version of Jo Cox that we often repeat every June. It was specific. It took sides. Some of it was uncomfortable, even within her own party. Ten years on, the line that we repeat—rightly—about what we have in common should unsettle us as much as it comforts us.
The motion is honest about what has not changed. As has been mentioned, Sir David Amess was murdered in 2021, and the threats against elected representatives have become so routine that we now build entire protocols around something as ordinary as a constituency surgery.
The motion has been signed by members from every party in this chamber, and I do not think we should just wave that away as being a nice gesture, because every member who signed the motion echoes Jo Cox’s moral fortitude, her courage and her ability to know that standing with the marginalised is not political performance but decency. It is easy to vote for a sentence about having more in common, but it is far harder to square that with the hate that others people and isolates communities that are begging for love and care.
Jo Cox’s family have said this week that what troubles them now is not disagreement but the way that disagreement curdles into language that, as David Linden touched on, stops acknowledging the other side as people, language that corrupts the beauty of the word “local” into a hostile and alien phrase and language that seeks to convince us that some of us are less welcome here, less human than other people. That is the gap between the motion and the vote, and it is the gap that this Parliament will be judged on long after tonight’s debate is forgotten. The slide that we are seeing right now is gradual, and I believe that it is reversible, but only if we choose deliberately to reverse it.
Today, therefore, I want to remember Jo Cox with the full beauty of her being. I want to remember that she was Batley and Spen born and bred, and proud of it. I want to remember her relentless campaigning on creating safe civilian havens in Syria and the words that she used in the last two questions that she lodged in Parliament, which echoed her belief that our country could exercise the privileges and powers that we hold to do good for people regardless of borders or race.
I also remember what her killer shamefully yelled when he killed her. After her murder, Jo Cox’s husband said in a statement that we must
“fight against the hatred that killed her”,
and I do not believe we can fight that hatred unless we know what it is to start with.
I support the motion whole-heartedly, and I hope that every member who signed it means it for more than just tonight, so that, the next time this chamber has a chance to act on what divides us and we speak as if we have more in common with one another than that which divides us, we actually vote like it as well.