The widowed husband of murdered Labour MP Jo Cox has spoken about his role in organising a vigil for victims of conflict in London on Sunday and said it was continuing the work they were doing when they first met.
Brendan Cox spoke about his role in organising the event on behalf of the Together Coalition, a network of more than 300 groups focussed on community cohesion.
He told GB News: “I’m very worried about the community cohesion in the UK. What it’s designed to do is to give voice to the vast majority of the public who feel the grief, whether they are Palestinian or Israeli, have no time for antisemitism, have no time for anti-Muslim hatred, and want to protect our communities in the UK.
“We don’t need to import the conflict from Israel-Palestine, into the UK and so this is led by families who have lost people in Palestine led by people who have lost people in Israel, saying, if we can come together, if we can bury our differences and say there can be no room for hate on our streets, then we should all be able to do that as well.”
Speaking to Andrew Pierce and Bev Turner, he said he and Jo had worked on the issue before her death at the hands of a far-right extremist in 2016.
“Jo and I worked on this kind of stuff before, we worked together when we met. We were working on conflicts around the world. We worked on Israel-Palestine together.
“In fact, we worked on Lebanon together, we worked on countries around the world and in all of that, as you say, what Jo did was to try not to sort of say on this side on that side, but actually to try to find those areas where people can agree, where people can have that commonality and that’s not glib. In fact, it’s one of the hardest things to do.
“One of the easiest things to do is to believe a simplistic narrative that the other side is completely wrong and you are completely right and actually to see that nuance and to find those areas where people come together, I think that’s where the vast majority of the British public are. They’re very sensible, very pragmatic. They’re not extreme. But sometimes too often their voices are drowned out.”
Asked if Christmas was difficult for him and his children, he added: “We’ve just been going through old Christmas videos of Jo with the kids at their various stages, singing various Christmas songs, they were three and five.
“I’m very lucky. My kids are incredibly resilient and, incredibly, still full of Jo’s love and empathy, and they’re certainly the thing that has kept me going ever since ever since she was killed, but also, I think, that signal of hope, so they don’t have a sort of shred of hate in them.
“They don’t harbour a sort of deep and underlying resentment. They treat people as they come and this Christmas they will just be looking forward as all kids will be to what comes down the chimney.”
