Conor McGinn was at the Irish Centre in Liverpool, attending a lunchtime event with the Taoiseach, on June 16th when he received a message saying that Jo Cox had been attacked outside her constituency clinic in Yorkshire. A local man called Thomas Mair shot and stabbed the 41-year-old mother of two, shouting "This is for Britain. Britain will always come first".
It was a week before the Brexit referendum, and Cox had campaigned for Britain to remain in the EU.
An MP for St Helens in Merseyside, but originally from Armagh, McGinn entered parliament on the same day as Cox after the 2015 general election and the two new Labour MPs bonded immediately.
“Jo and I were similar in background and attitude and in our humour, and we both had young families. And to be honest about it, most of what we talked about was about how difficult it was being in politics, being a new MP and coming to terms with having to balance that with having a family life when you’ve got young children,” McGinn says.
As McGinn exchanged text messages with colleagues during the afternoon, it became clear Cox’s condition was serious, and around 5pm, it was announced she had died.
Her murder prompted an extraordinary outpouring of grief, not only because her death left two children aged three and five without a mother, but also because of her exemplary work as an effective champion in parliament on issues such as Syria and Gaza.
It also sparked a debate about MPs’ security and about the level of personal abuse politicians face, particularly on social media.
“Jo’s death was seminal in a decision that I took in the summer, which was to limit my interaction on social media. I think for a lot of politicians, the use of Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, has actually in some respects made it more difficult to engage just because of the volume of trolling you receive. It makes it very hard for constituents who genuinely want to contact me to get through to me. So I think I really re-evaluated all that,” McGinn says.
“And in truth on a very personal level, I think it’s made me and a lot of other colleagues realise that you have to put things in perspective, that life is too short. I had a baby daughter a few months after Jo died and her and my family are the most important thing to me. And I think for me and most of my colleagues, there’s now no apology going to be made for putting our families and our health and security first.”
The referendum campaign was suspended briefly after Cox’s murder, with some commentators predicting the tragedy would halt the gathering momentum of the Leave campaign. But when voters went to the polls a week later, they backed Brexit by 52 per cent to 48 per cent, surprising pollsters, bookmakers and financial markets.
“I certainly wasn’t surprised by the result in my own constituency, which voted to leave the European Union. I think, on reflection, there’s lots of instances you can point to where the Remain campaign’s actions or inactions contributed to that. But I don’t think you can look at it in isolation either,” McGinn says.
"I think it's part of a pattern and the election of Donald Trump fits into that pattern. Whether it's been a rejection of what one might call establishment or conventional politics, the unorthodox has become the orthodox and that's a huge challenge for politicians and for moderates to come up with, not just policy responses to that but also the emotional responses to that. Essentially that's what Brexit was.
“The Leave campaign very effectively used a slogan like Take Back Control and when people in their lives feel that they’ve no power, no say, that’s a very powerful thing to offer people.”
Although he campaigned energetically against Brexit, McGinn now believes the priority must be to ensure Britain negotiates the best possible deal as it leaves the EU. He argues that politicians must respond to voters’ concerns about immigration and avoid dismissing those who voted to leave the EU as racists and xenophobes.
