Wealden councillors back plans to mark anniversary of murder of Jo Cox MP
Wealden councillors have backed plans to mark the tenth anniversary of the murder of Jo Cox.
At a meeting on Wednesday (May 13), Wealden District Council unanimously agreed to promote events linked to The Great Get Together — a nationwide celebration organised by The Jo Cox Foundation.
The events will be held between June 19-21 and mark the tenth anniversary of the Labour MP’s murder in 2016.
The council’s decision to promote the events came as part of a motion tabled by Labour councillor Daniel Manvell.
He said: “I can just remember the shock of the news; it was visceral. It just completely floored me that an MP had been killed in the UK. That something like that could happen.”
He added: “But what is even more sad, is that I actually can’t remember where I was or what I was doing when I heard that Southend MP David Ames was murdered in 2021. I think that shows the level of political violence in the UK and around the world’s democracies between 2016 when Jo was murdered and 2021 when David was. We’ve just become desensitised to just how ugly democratic politics have become.”
The motion also called on the council to note how ‘abuse and intimidation remains an ongoing issue for elected representatives’ and also set out a belief ‘that abuse and intimidation should have no place in our politics’.
Several councillors shared their own experiences.
Labour councillor Ben Cox told the chamber how a local volunteer involved in his party’s last general election campaign had their address spread online in an attempt to intimidate. He said he had no “door knockers” out for the recent local election campaign as a direct result of this incident.
Cllr Cox also disclosed that he receives ‘death threats, quite regularly’.
Conservative councillor Johanna Howell said her children had asked her to “withdraw from politics entirely” following the murder of David Ames.
She said: “It would seem a great shame that those of us who put our heads above the parapet and often get them shot down — and it is deeply, deeply unpleasant, we all know that — should be shut up.
“Because, actually, if we are all shut up, what happens then? We become a dictatorship. So democracy is very important and our safety within that democracy is also very important. None of us should be frightened, it is not right.”
Council leader Rachel Millward (Green) said: “I have the police considering my safety a lot of the time now. I forgot to turn the comments off on one of my posts on the weekend and it took three hours deleting just outright abuse and threats.
“But I still know there are many people in our society who have a lot less privilege and a lot more hate thrown at them than I do. And Jo [Cox] was right, we have more in common, we have humanity in common.
“Wherever we come from, however we got here, whatever our faith, whatever our gender, whatever our status in society or otherwise, whether we are here temporarily or in families that have been here for generations — there are no expectations, abuse is never okay and all that we can do is keep being brave and keep committing to that.”
The motion was passed unanimously.