On 16 June, Labour MP Jo Cox was stabbed and shot in the street as she made her way to help her constituents. Four hours later, the police announced that she had died, and it felt as if something delicate had burst. Her death seemed to be a symbol of how lost we had become, her life a compass that might somehow set us back on the right path. She quickly became Our Jo. She was so good, we kept saying, as if that was somehow a surprise.

Over the next few days, heartbroken friends and colleagues spoke about the change they wanted to see. They sounded tired. One after another, they described a ravenous, ruthless political culture that demanded their complicity, rewarded their worst instincts, and sneered at their good faith. Cox’s approach to politics was based on hope, not fear, her friend Stephen Kinnock told the House of Commons. “Jo understood that rhetoric has consequences. When insecurity, fear and anger are used to light a fuse, then an explosion is inevitable.”

Kinnock’s idea, that there was something toxic in our public discourse, felt intuitively true. We saw the Trump phenomenon in the US, and wondered if something similar could be happening in Britain. For a moment, it seemed as if everyone – MPs and members of the public – wanted the same thing. A new tone. We could be kinder. We could be better.

The death of Jo Cox, it was hoped, would lead to a change in the way politics were conducted. Photograph: Ian Hinchliffe/Rex/Shutterstock

It is more than six weeks, now, since Cox was killed: weeks of acrimony, recrimination and abuse. If she was ever “Our Jo”, it is beginning to feel as if we have lost her. Her friends and colleagues survey the wreckage of these weeks in horrified disbelief.

“I think that moment has just … gone,” says Stella Creasy, Labour MP for Walthamstow. “It’s horrific. Jo was a mate of mine, and it’s just really hard to think about the fact that we’ve lost her. It was like a thunderbolt. For a brief moment everyone said: ‘Oh my God – what are we doing?’ And now it’s returned, twice as bad.”

“Just before parliament broke up, I said: ‘It’s like Jo Cox never died,’” says Anna Soubry, a former Conservative minister now returned to the backbenches. “Tories and Labour alike. How quickly that memory, that determination to do things differently, disappeared.”

Ayesha Hazarika, former adviser to Harriet Harman and Ed Miliband, remembers the hashtag #ThankYourMP, which garnered thousands of messages of gratitude to public servants who are often demonised. “It was just trying to remind people that no, they’re not all massive shitbags. And all of it has just been erased. I’ve never known it as brutal as it is now.”

In the US, Donald Trump’s verbal acts of violence are a reminder that you can say almost anything you like and make hay from it. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

It isn’t easy to unpick exactly how this came about. Partly, it has to do with the coincidence of two seismic political debates, over Europe and the Labour party, wherein participants on both sides consider their cause righteous, and their rivals’ an existential threat. Partly, it is the osmosis of ad hominem assaults – especially against women – from below the line to above it, the development of a febrile and instantaneous political culture that rewards those with the most uncompromising distaste for their opponents. And it may be to do with the disorienting influence of Donald Trump, whose extraordinary acts of verbal violence have given every politician a tempting reminder that you can say almost anything you like and make hay from it. But it is also to do with something much more deeply and subtly rooted, a careless, universal conception of politics as a battleground, a metaphor so entrenched that we don’t even notice it. What the consequences of all this will be is still harder to say. But asking that question prompts others: if it’s all just words, why is it so terribly difficult to change? Why have we forgotten Jo Cox?





She died on a Thursday. By the end of the following weekend, it was clear that both sides in the EU referendum debate were trying to work out how to capitalise on her death without seeming to do so. A leak from the Stronger In campaign revealed its plans to reflect “the new context we’re in”. Nigel Farage derided the idea that he and his cohorts had gone too far with their infamous “breaking point” poster, and the “clear implication that, somehow, a bad atmosphere has been whipped up”.



Nigel Farage in front of the ‘Breaking Point’ poster. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA

Ugly as they are, these political machinations are unsurprising, perhaps even understandable. What is stranger still is the speed with which the old rhetoric of violence and confrontation has returned across the political spectrum. On the morning of the referendum result, Farage celebrated a victory that had been won “without a single bullet being fired”. When Thomas Mair, Cox’s alleged killer, appeared in court on Saturday 18 June, he gave his name as “death to traitors, freedom for Britain”. Not two weeks later, the term “traitor” was being used by some of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters as a standard term of abuse for anyone deemed disloyal. It appeared on the front page of the Morning Star, and in endless tweets and Facebook posts. Elsewhere, an elderly man was pictured in a T-shirt bearing the legend “Eradicate the right wing Blairite vermin”, a phrase that will have drawn a shudder from anyone with a passing familiarity with the tropes of antisemitic and anti-immigrant prejudice.

Meanwhile, as the Conservative party has remade itself, the Daily Mail and the Sun have returned to business as usual: Traitor Gove, Knifing of Boris, First Blood to Theresa. In the Mail on Sunday, Rachel Johnson wrote of Michael Gove as a “Westminster suicide bomber”, and professed her hope that she would again dine with his family “when the bleeding bodies of the fallen are removed from the smoking battlefield of this campaign”. The Guardian and Observer were susceptible, too. On a Friday, a prominent headline in the comment pages referred to the “reek of death” hanging over the Labour party; two days later, another referred to its “stench”.

Michael Gove, who was termed a ‘Westminster suicide bomber’ by Rachel Johnson. Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters

Nor have MPs themselves proved immune. One Conservative, Ben Wallace, said that Gove was “Theon Greyjoy or will be by the time I am finished with him” – a reference to a Game of Thrones character who is castrated. Labour backbencher Ian Austin told Jeremy Corbyn to “sit down and shut up” during his response to the Chilcot report. John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said that his references to his party’s rebels as “plotting and conniving” and being “fucking useless” were just “normal political descriptions”. Not to be outdone, Corbyn’s challenger Owen Smith turned to a kind of language that hardly seemed to shock any more: it would be his job, he said, to “smash [Theresa May] back on her heels”.

The 40 women MPs who had signed a letter to Corbyn asking him to do more to stop online abuse might have hoped for a more inspiring alternative. One colleague, Jess Phillips – not herself entirely immune to charges of intemperate language, having previously said she would knife Corbyn in the front and boasted of telling Diane Abbott to “fuck off” – tweeted last week that she had had to call the police and change her locks because of death threats – a statement that itself drew a predictable set of responses claiming that she had made it up. Even in that context, Smith’s remark seems to have exacted almost no political cost. In the end, he apologised. Initially, he just said that he was being “robust”.

“Robust.” “Normal.” By these analyses, objections to such language are merely squeamish. Margaret Hodge, the Labour MP for Barking, has recently received antisemitic hatemail of a kind that has prompted her to alert the police for the first time in her career. But, while she agrees that “language shapes behaviour”, she adds: “It’s false promises about immigration, about getting our country back, that are the real problem.” Emma Rees, national organiser for Momentum, says she deplores terms such as “traitors”, and points to similar abuse suffered by young activists on her own side; whatever vitriol is being doled out to anti-Corbyn MPs, she adds, is not with Momentum’s approval, tacit or otherwise. The calls for a new language in the aftermath of Cox’s death were “spot on”. Still: “We have to draw a distinction between abusive and inflammatory language on the one hand and confrontation and disagreement on the other. It’s critical that we don’t shy away from disagreement.” This is right, but also a truism. The problem is that the two are almost inseparable.

And they are, the evidence suggests, consequential, too.

Research by Nathan Kalmoe, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, has troubling implications for how an individual’s worldview might also be shaped by the rhetoric he hears. In 2010, Kalmoe presented groups of subjects with two different political ads, one relying on violent metaphors, another replacing those terms with less loaded synonyms. In the groups that heard the first version of the ad, those with an already aggressive disposition became significantly more likely to support acts of political violence.

We might naturally think of Trump, to whom incendiary language has become second nature: a joke to his more reasonable supporters, a dog whistle to the rest. “I was going to hit one guy in particular, a very little guy,” he said last week, in remarks about the Democratic national convention. “I was going to hit this guy so hard his head would spin, he wouldn’t know what the hell happened.” But according to Kalmoe, the rhetoric needn’t even come with that kind of explicit thuggery attached. The terms he analysed weren’t especially forceful: even the kinds of entrenched metaphors that we barely notice as figurative language could have a tangible effect. “It’s nothing extreme, it’s common language,” says Kalmoe. “‘Fighting for people like you’, things like that. They’re more likely to endorse statements about politicians being scared straight by people, or that there are some problems with government that could be fixed by a few well-aimed bullets. It can be a routine part of the conversation and it can also be pernicious.”

Of course, at this heightened moment, those ordinarily innocuous metaphors – stabbed in the back, sticking the knife in – sound a little different anyway. Suddenly, with a much more immediate referent, we see them anew. When we look more closely at these images that we had stopped noticing, we may get a queasy reminder of how thoroughly they permeate our thinking.

After Jo Cox’s death, violent metaphors in politics have taken on a new resonance. Photograph: ddp USA/Rex/Shutterstock

“When something happens like Jo Cox being killed, to say that reneging on a deal is ‘stabbing someone in the back’ takes on a new resonance,” says Dr Christopher Hart, senior lecturer in linguistics at Lancaster University. “And, for some people, it simply confirms what they already thought. If you’re used to thinking about politics as a violent encounter, when something actually violent is happening, it may just seem as if the language is becoming more real. If you really buy into the rhetoric of politics as two opposing parties at war with each other, then, as a supporter, you end up seeing yourself as a soldier.”

In this context, talk of treachery and vermin and castration and suicide bombers begins to feel still more consequential, still further from the politics that Cox might have hoped for as a legacy. But it may help with the first step towards resolving it: taking it seriously. And there are plenty of people in politics who do have a responsible view of how words should be used.

Marc Stears, who was a speechwriter for Ed Miliband, says that there are two types of people in that role. “There are people who have the motto ‘the action is in the reaction’. All they care about is provocation: the image or the language that will get people shouting. The much more decent approach is to begin in your head with 10 or 15 sorts of people, and think: how are they going to hear what I am trying to say? How are they going to respond to it?”

It may also help if your candidate is a woman. Professor Jonathan Charteris-Black, a specialist in critical metaphor analysis at the University of the West of England, undertook a study into the use of figurative language by male and female parliamentarians: focusing on six MPs in particular, he found that the men were far more likely to indulge in grand metaphorical constructs. Over five years, Harriet Harman used a total of seven metaphors from four categories in House of Commons speeches; Peter Hain, in contrast, used 162.

It is bitterly appropriate that, even as they eschew melodramatic language, women are the ones who are most often subjected to its consequences. All of the female MPs I spoke to felt that they were experiencing a moment unlike any other, almost entirely because of social media. One, who did not wish to be named, said that she was trying to make sense of how to deal with her most entrenched opponents by reading up on the psychology of cults. In such uncompromising circumstances, nuance is hopeless – and confrontation becomes almost inevitable. It may even feel more honest.

“It’s something that contributes to the wider climate in which it’s acceptable to say things it just wasn’t a few years ago,” says Dr Judi Atkins, a lecturer in politics at Coventry University who focuses on rhetoric. “The anonymity [of social media] gives people the freedom to say what they like. And then the barriers are broken down, and those things become not just sayable, but accepted. At that point many people want politicians to say these things, and some politicians like it because it gives them a shortcut to saying that they’re authentic.”

That’s Trump’s model of authenticity. It is not Cox’s. Hers relied, those who loved her told us, on getting to know people, listening to their concerns, eschewing incendiary hits, and working hard for the things she believed in.

Violent language from the Daily Mail and the Sun.

When Margaret Hodge thinks back on the events of six weeks ago, she lapses into something like hopelessness. “It sort of felt as if … had we all taken all of this a little more seriously, it might not have happened. And so of course it has influenced me.” Does she see any chance that we will soon come to our collective senses and try to do better? There’s a long pause. “Nope,” she says flatly. “I don’t, really. Nope. I’ve had hopes, but I don’t think that they’re real, now. Six weeks, and here we are. I can’t see it. Can you?”

It’s hard. But if our crisis is about language, perhaps language contains a way out, too. “You can’t get away from metaphors,” says Charteris-Black. “You risk becoming boring and you risk losing your style. But you do get to choose which ones.”

If you read Cox’s own speeches, you will find them strikingly devoid of the imagery of conflict. There are no enemies here, no battles, no assaults, no knives. Perhaps, having spent so much time on the ground as an aid worker, she understood that, all too often, this most extreme set of terms is overblown. To honour her life, then, instead of a metaphor of violence, choose other ones. Metaphors of growth and weather, or that classic political trope: the noble journey. Hers was ended before it should have been. For the rest of us, the destination she might have hoped to reach is on the horizon: further away, somehow, than it was six weeks ago, but still, just, in sight.