Jo Cox’s murder prompted calls for a ‘kinder, gentler politics’. Why has intolerance prevailed?

Ten years on from Jo Cox’s murder, Kim Leadbeater fears that the consensus around “kinder, gentler politics” in the wake of her sister’s death was short-lived. “Sadly and regrettably, over the last decade things are worse,” she says. Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen and mother of two young children, was murdered outside a library in West Yorkshire in June 2016 by an English nationalist. In the aftermath of Cox’s killing, the then Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn , issued the call for “a kinder and gentler politics”, echoed by then prime minister David Cameron’s call to “drive out” intolerance. Just hours before Cox was killed, Nigel Farage unveiled the infamous “breaking point” poster – depicting Syrian refugees lining up at a European border, cementing the politics of scapegoating and fear into the Brexit referendum campaign. A decade on, intolerance appears to have prevailed. Police are encouraged to disclose ethnicity and nationality of some offenders, and Britain braces for far-right unrest whenever they are not white. After Henry Nowak was murdered by a Sikh man in Southampton as police dismissed Nowak’s dying plea for help, Farage called for “pure, cold rage”. Rioting followed. Later, racist mobs burned people out of their homes in Belfast . …