Get Together remembers MP who loved a party

Imagine this scenario: you have a friend, a very vivacious and passionate character whom you admire and like very much. You spend a lot of time in her company and you do a lot of things together.

Out of the blue, you get a phone call. Your 41-year-old friend is dead. Not only that, she has been murdered in cold blood, in broad daylight.

She has been killed by a fanatic who hates what she stands for.

You are angry, grief stricken, utterly bereaved. For months, you struggle to get over the tragedy. On the first anniversary of her death, you feel you want to commemorate her life in a suitable way. What do you do?

This was the issue faced by Brendan Cox, whose young wife Jo, a Member of Parliament, was stabbed to death by a zealot who shouted, “Britain First".

Mrs Cox, the mother of two young children, had been a passionate campaigner for human rights not just in her own community but in the wider world. Her profound sense of justice made her angry about the treatment of refugees who were fleeing with their children from terrifying war zones.

In thinking about how to commemorate her life, Mr Cox came to the conclusion that there should be a number of public events that expressed and promoted the values that his wife held dear.

One of the things that concerned Mrs Cox was the way in which the United Kingdom was becoming deeply divided by angry rhetoric that demonised people because of their political or religious convictions.

In fact, her murder was designed to divide the country, and ramp up levels of hatred between individuals and communities. Reflecting on all of these matters, Mr Cox came up with the idea of staging thousands of street parties, picnics and baking competitions in order to celebrate the life of communities.

He felt that the UK-wide programme – called The Great Get Together and marked by events at the weekend – would be a “fitting tribute" to his wife, one that Mrs Cox would have approved of. It would, he said be “a powerful statement" about the value of human life in the face of things that de-humanise us.

Mr Cox told BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine his late wife “loved a party" and would have been “thrilled by the idea" of people coming together on her behalf.

“We wanted something that celebrated Jo's energy but also brought the community together," he said.

“The killing of Jo was a political thing designed to divide our country and split communities apart."

Mrs Cox had used her maiden speech in parliament in 2015 to say people in the UK “have far more in common with each other than things that divide us".

I think that Mr Cox is right to highlight the increasingly poisonous nature of much public rhetoric about political and religious issues these days.

The current culture of demonising opponents is poisoning the wells of public discourse. It is not enough, it seems, to agree to differ; the difference has to be expressed vociferously and unkindly.

There is no doubt that this tendency has gained more traction by the advent of social media, which allows people to express vicious opinions about other people under the cloak of anonymity.

What exacerbates this problem is that it is easy nowadays for people to get all their news and opinions from online websites that reinforce the opinions that they already hold.

In other words, it removes the need to pay attention to the views of people who disagree with you.

The Great Get Together was also designed to highlight another of Mrs Cox's concerns, the increasing problem of loneliness in our communities.

Of course, it's easy to romanticise the past, but it remains true that we have lost, or are losing, a sense of neighbourliness in which we seek to look after each other. This sense of community responsibility still exists in smaller neighbourhoods.

I applaud this way of celebrating Jo Cox's life.

Let Mr Cox have the last word: “The reason I am so optimistic is not because of our capacity to organise this (we have none) or the brilliance of the idea (breaking bread together is hardly original), it’s because I think there is a national mood that is crying out for this.

“I believe that people are sick of the emphasis placed upon our divisions, along with political extremism and the nastiness of the public debate at this time."