Brendan Cox also says the MP had grown concerned over the whipping up of hatred in the EU referendum debate

Labour MP Jo Cox was killed for her very strong political views, her husband has said, adding that she had grown concerned about the whipping up of hatred in the EU referendum debate.

Brendan Cox, a former adviser to Gordon Brown and Save the Children executive, said his wife had been worried about the tone in the EU debate before she was shot and stabbed outside her constituency surgery.

He told the BBC: “I think she was very worried that the language was coarsening, that people were being driven to take more extreme positions, that people didn’t work with each other as individuals and on issues; it was all much too tribal and unthinking.

“And she was particularly worried – we talked about this regularly – particularly worried about the direction of, not just in the UK but globally, the direction of politics at the moment, particularly around creating division and playing on people’s worst fears rather than their best instincts. So we talked about that a lot and it was something that worried her.”

Since her death, David Cameron, Labour MP Stephen Kinnock and others have highlighted her pro-EU views and made the case for Britain to keep on the path of tolerance rather than narrow-mindedness.

Asked whether he was concerned about people using her death in public debate, Cox said: “She was a politician and she had very strong political views and I believe she was killed because of those views. I think she died because of them, and she would want to stand up for those in death as much as she did in life.”

Cox also spoke about the grief of the couple’s two children and how important support from the public had been.

“The two things that I’ve been very focused on is how do we support and protect the children and how do we make sure that something good comes out of this,” he said.

“And what the public support and outpouring of love around this does is it also helps the children see that what they’re feeling and other people are feeling, that the grief that they feel isn’t abnormal, that they feel it more acutely and more painfully and more personally but that actually their mother was someone who was loved by lots of people and that therefore, it’s OK to be upset and it’s OK for them to cry and to be sad about it.”

Cox said he would remember his wife as somebody who had “energy, a joy about living life”.

“She cherished every moment … I remember so much about her but most of all I will remember that she met the world with love and both love for her children, love in her family and also love for people she didn’t know.

“She just approached things with a spirit, she wasn’t perfect at all you know, but she just wanted to make the world a better place, to contribute, and we love her very much.”

Cox spoke to the broadcaster ahead of a series of rallies to be held on Wednesday – the day his wife would have turned 42. The evenings will be anchored in Trafalgar Square in London but mirrored across the world, from her constituency of Batley and Spen in West Yorkshire to Aleppo and Darayya in Syria.

Separately, a memorial fund has passed £1m after launching online four days ago. The sum, which was reached following donations by more than 30,000 people from around the world, was described as “overwhelming” by those involved.

Friends of the Labour MP set up the fund on the day after her death, in collaboration with her family and her husband to raise funds for causes that were close to her heart.

It lists them as the Royal Voluntary Service, which supports volunteers helping to combat loneliness in Cox’s Batley and Spen constituency, the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate and the White Helmets, a volunteer search and rescue organisation in Syria.