What happened to Jo Cox? What did Batley and Spen MP say in maiden speech?
Jo Cox, the MP for Batley and Spen, was murdered by neo-Nazi white supremacist outside Birstall Library in 2016.
On June 3 2015, just under a month after being elected, Jo Cox made her maiden speech in the House of Commons as the new MP for Batley and Spen.
In it, she uttered the immortal words: “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.”
This message, which has since travelled far and wide, made Ms Cox’s maiden speech one of the most famous in the history of Parliament.
And in her first year as an MP she accomplished more than many do in an entire Parliamentary term.
She established a cross-party Commission on Loneliness, which led to the UK producing the first government strategy on loneliness and appointing the world’s first minister for loneliness.
She also set up the All Party Parliamentary Group on Syria, which was in the midst of a gruesome civil war.
However, just over a year after Ms Cox’s “more in common” message, she was horrifically murdered outside a library in Birstall, where she was about to hold a constituency surgery.
Thomas Mair, a white supremacist, who was obsessed with the Nazis and Apartheid-era South Africa, shot and stabbed Ms Cox as he shouted “Britain first”.
It was just a week before her 42nd birthday, and left her young children, Cuillin and Lejla, without a mother.
She was the first sitting MP to be assassinated since Ian Gow, a Tory MP, was killed in an IRA car bomb attack in 1990.
Mair was found guilty of all charges in November 2016, and had a whole-life tariff imposed on him.
One of the great tragedies of the murder was that Ms Cox was killed in her hometown, the area she had grown up in and was then representing in the House of Commons.
She was born in June 1974 at Staincliffe General Hospital, in Dewsbury, to Jean, a school secretary, and Gordon, a toothpaste factory worker in Leeds.
Ms Cox grew up in Batley and attended Heckmondwike Grammar School alongside her sister Kim Leadbeater, who is now the MP for Spen Valley.
Heckmonwike was also where her parents had met and fallen in love.
Ms Leadbeater said the pair “had a great childhood, we were always surrounded by love”.
She remembers “walking to school [together], climbing trees, pretending we were in the A Team”.
Ms Cox went to Pembroke College, the hardest at Cambridge University to get into, and says this was when she started to get into politics.
She told The Yorkshire Post, shortly after being elected: “I never really grew up being political or Labour.
“It kind of came at Cambridge where it was just a realisation that where you were born mattered, that how you spoke mattered … who you knew mattered.
“I didn’t really speak right or knew the right people. I spent the summers packing toothpaste at a factory working where my dad worked and everyone else had gone on a gap year.
“To be honest, my experience at Cambridge really knocked me for about five years.”
Ms Leadbeater said that “Jo was not naturally confident - she was actually very shy when we were growing up”.
She remembers her sister asking her to order the takeaway as she was too nervous.
But Ms Leadbeater says Ms Cox is a great example to younger people who assume successful people “have always been really confident and self assured”.
“Over the years she worked incredibly hard to overcome her fears and doubts,” Ms Leadbeater explained.
Ms Cox worked for Glenys Kinnock, the wife of former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and Sarah Brown, the wife of Gordon Brown, as well as charities like Oxfam and Save the Children.
She was chair of the Labour Women’s Network and found UK Women, a research institute for women in Britain.
After being elected in 2015, increasing Labour’s majority in Batley and Spen, she worked collaboratively across parties on a number of issues, including with former Tory minister Andrew Mitchell on Syria.
“I think partly that was because although she ended up in politics, she started much more as a humanitarian and campaigner,” her husband Brendan Cox told this paper.
“That gave her a set of skills and principles that were you work with different people to achieve the ends that you agree on.”
Her legacy is continued by the Jo Cox Foundation, which continues to promote her message that “have far more in common with each other than things that divide us”.