Jo Cox

Shot and stabbed on 16 June 2016 in Birstall, West Yorkshire by Thomas Mair; the Labour MP was killed days before the Brexit referendum on the street of her home constituency.

Overview

Cox, a first-term MP and former Oxfam aid worker who chaired the all-party group on Syria and campaigned for refugees, was walking to her advice surgery when Mair, a loner with long far-right associations, shot her three times and stabbed her with a dagger, shouting Britain first. He gave his name in court as death to traitors, freedom for Britain, and was sentenced to whole life imprisonment. Parliament suspended the referendum campaign in mourning; her widower Brendan Cox founded the Jo Cox Foundation and the Great Get Together weekend. The murder, the first killing of a sitting British MP since Ian Gow in 1990, forced a reckoning with the coarsening of political rhetoric and the safety of constituency MPs, sharpened again by the murders of David Amess in 2021.