Don’t take our freedoms for granted
I AM on the train home from Parliament, where we were remembering our colleague Jo Cox MP.
So many thoughts are going through my head but one word keeps coming up over and over again: freedom. We have heard a lot about freedom of late.
As a member of the defence committee, I spend a lot of time travelling to and looking at countries where there is no freedom but a lot of fear, from Russia to Iraq and Afghanistan. I have seen how our human rights and the rule of law is being attacked and eroded by enemies who have no time for freedom and who aim to rule by fear.
In democracy you give up some freedom for the collective good. No one person decides what freedoms you will have, we collectively pool that responsibility to a parliament.
I know many people have lost faith in this collective pooling and their representatives, fearing they are all motivated by greed and self-interest. Jo’s life showed this is not true.
Fear of losing a national sense of collective identity has led some to be fearful of immigration despite the fact most people who come here do so because they like and admire our freedoms. They cherish our freedom, sometimes more than we do because they have experienced fear and a lack of freedom.
Jo met many people living without freedom and in fear in refugee camps. I have met them in war zones. Neither of us ever dreamed of growing fear and loss of freedom in our local communities. It was not locally that danger lay, we thought. Jo’s murder forces us to reconsider.
Now is the time to fight back and reassert our right to live in freedom and without fear. Your freedom is not curtailed by the person who wants to live and work alongside you. It is destroyed by the people who want you to be afraid, to live in fear and with hatred. Hatred for anyone who holds different views, has a different life-style, or worships a different God.
In her maiden speech in the Commons, Jo reflected on the diversity of her constituency but emphasised that “we are more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us”.
Today was tough but I will refuse to change how I live or do my job and I urge you not to either. The email and social media trolls must be banished to live their lives in darkness.
Those who threaten violence must face the law. Our children, Jo’s children will live in freedom and without fear of thinking and speaking freely. That must be how we honour the values we see as central to our freedoms: decency, service, integrity, honesty and respect.