Nigel Farage gesticulates in front of an anti-immigration poster entitled Breaking Point.
Well, Thomas Mair broke all right. The question is, was he incited?

Jo Cox: an attack on humanity, idealism and democracy

The slide from civilisation to barbarism is shorter than we might like to imagine. Every violent crime taints the ideal of an orderly society, but when that crime is committed against the people who are peacefully selected to write the rules, then the affront is that much more profound.

The killing, by stabbing and repeated shooting in the street, of Jo Cox is, in the first instance, an exceptionally heinous villainy. She was the mother of two very young children, who will now have to grow up without her. It is also, however, in a very real sense, an attack on democracy.

Jo Cox: an attack on humanity, idealism and democracy

Jo Cox, however, was not just any MP doing her duty. She was also an MP who was driven by an ideal. The former charity worker explained what that ideal was as eloquently as anyone could in her maiden speech last year. “Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration,” she insisted, “be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir. While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.”

The police are investigating reports that the assailant yelled “Britain First” during the attack. If those words were used, this would appear to be not merely a chauvinist taunt, but the name of a far-right political party, whose candidate for City Hall turned his back in disgust on Sadiq Khan at the count, in sectarian rage at a great cosmopolitan city’s decision to make a Muslim mayor.

How ironic is it that one of Britain’s leading campaigners for a more compassionate response to the Syrian refugee crisis should be killed, not in the midst of that conflict, but in the streets of her own home constituency, where she has just come from working on behalf of her constituents on the practical problems of their daily lives.  This was not some starry eyed idealist, but someone acutely aware of the difficulties faced by communities with large immigrant populations.

Jo Cox: an attack on humanity, idealism and democracy

We are in the midst of what risks becoming a plebiscite on immigration and immigrants. The tone is divisive and nasty. Nigel Farage on Thursday unveiled a poster of unprecedented repugnance. The backdrop was a long and thronging line of displaced people in flight. The message: “The EU has failed us all.” The headline: “Breaking point.” The time for imagining that the Europhobes can be engaged on the basis of facts – such as the reality that a refugee crisis that started in Syria and north Africa can hardly be blamed on the EU, or the inconvenient detail that obligations under the refugee convention do not depend on EU membership – has passed. One might have still hoped, however, that even merchants of post-truth politics might hold back from the sort of entirely post-moral politics that is involved in taking the great humanitarian crisis of our time, and then whipping up hostility to the victims as a means of chivvying voters into turning their backs on the world.

And that is what the Brexit campaign has become. A plebiscite on turning back refugees and immigrants that are coming for reasons largely removed from the EU, and if anything, more due to the aggressive middle eastern policies pursued by Tony Blair and successive British governments. Perhaps more than anyone, she was the embodiment of resistance to the xenophobia sweeping the land. As a European, I am ashamed that she was killed for her beliefs. I hope the vast majority of British citizens feel the same.

It is far to early to tell whether her killing will have any effect, one way or the other, on the outcome of the Brexit referendum. What it does highlight, however, is just how low the Brexit campaign has come to tapping into people’s deepest and most atavistic fears. This isn’t just about politics now, or the macro-economics of staying part of a larger Union – or not.  It is about basic human values, and about a determination to remain on good terms with people very different from you. Before the EU ever became a single market, it was a humanitarian project to end xenophobia and war between European peoples. If Brexiteers want to leave the EU to undermine those basic principles even further, then the EU is better off without them.