In the week that passed between the murder of the British Labour M.P. Jo Cox and the day on which Britain voted in the European Union referendum, the people of Cox’s constituency of Batley and Spen needed somewhere to lay their flowers. At first, bouquets and handwritten tributes piled up and spilled across the pavement outside the bright-red door of Cox’s constituency office in Batley. There were soon too many, and the tributes were moved across the street to Market Place, and set outside the stately, mid-Victorian town hall.

The cards on the bouquets voiced anger, shock, and profound grief. One read, “Sometimes there is no sense in the world—this is one of those times. We will always love and remember you. Gwen and Ken (Lowe) xx.” I did not then know who the Lowes were, but I found those parentheses surprisingly moving and lambent with meaning. The inclusion of the bracketed surname seemed to have been an afterthought. Of course, Cox would have known who Gwen and Ken were. (I later discovered that the Lowes were Labour Party councillors who had worked with Cox.) But Jo was no longer alive to read their words. The note was half for the Lowes’ lost friend and half for others: other constituents, Cox’s family, the town at large. It was half private, half public.

The tension in the Lowes’ message revealed a wider conundrum. In the week in which the flowers piled high, there were heated arguments about how public, or private, to make Cox’s death. Everybody could agree that her murder was a tragedy. Cox was forty-one years old. She had two young children. She was the first M.P. to be assassinated since Ian Gow, who was killed by the I.R.A., in 1990. She was also the first woman, and the first Labour M.P., to be murdered in office. But it was judged by some as incendiary to politicize the tragedy, however political it seemed at first glance. (Cox had campaigned for the rights of Syrian refugees in her first year as an M.P., and was an advocate for Britain to remain in the E.U.; the man charged with her murder, Thomas Mair, is reported to have shouted “Britain first” as he attacked Cox, and gave his name in court as “death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”)

Whatever drove a man to murder a widely loved M.P., the attack could not have happened at a more fissile time in British politics. The referendum on the so-called Brexit has revealed deep divides not only within the ruling Conservative Party but between metropolitan, Europhile Britain, which was the heartland of Remain supporters, and the rest. The campaign had also unearthed old grudges. The question of immigration played an outsized role in the debate. As part of the E.U., and of the European Single Market, Britain was obliged to accept the free movement of people. Resentments about the recent influx of Eastern Europeans into the country are felt widely and deeply, particularly in poorer areas where public services are stretched.

The Leave campaign argued that by being outside the E.U., Britain could regain control of its immigration policy and institute new rules for migrants wishing to enter the U.K.—a legitimate policy, even if the Remain campaign thought it unworkable and unnecessary. At the fringes of the immigration debate, however, there was ugly nativism at play. On the morning of Cox’s death, Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) unveiled a now notorious poster showing a line of dark-faced migrants snaking its way toward the camera, along with the slogan “Breaking Point.” Many commentators observed that the aesthetics of the advertisement echoed Nazi propaganda from the nineteen-thirties.

On Wednesday afternoon, on what would have been Cox’s forty-second birthday, around two thousand people gathered in Batley’s Market Place for a memorial service, many wearing the white rose of Yorkshire on their lapels in Cox’s memory. Batley was once a thriving mill town, which pioneered the production of “shoddy” and “mungo” recycled wool, which it exported around the world. The mills are gone now, as are the town’s glory days: its largest employers are a supermarket and a biscuit factory. There is also a large number of immigrants—Pakistanis and Indians who came in the mid-twentieth century, and more recent arrivals from Eastern Europe. Representatives from every community in the town turned out for Cox.

The memorial was an ostensibly apolitical event, but the difficulties of de-politicizing such a charged gathering were evident from the start. At a little after 4 P.M., the large and quiet crowd watched a live feed of Jo’s husband, Brendan Cox, making a speech to the contemporaneous memorial service being held in London’s Trafalgar Square. Some in Batley applauded when Cox said that, on Jo’s birthday, “she would have spent it dashing around the streets of her home town trying to convince people that Britain is stronger in Europe. She feared the consequences of Europe dividing again, hated the idea of building walls between us, and worried about the dynamics that that could unleash.” The applause died as Cox continued, “but today isn’t about that.”

It was, and it wasn’t, about that. Cox concluded, saying that Jo had “come to symbolize something much bigger in our country and in our world, something that is under threat—her belief in tolerance and respect, her support for diversity and her stand against hatred and extremism, no matter where it comes from. Across the world we’re seeing forces of division playing on people’s worst fears, rather than their best instincts, trying to divide our communities, to exploit insecurities, and emphasize not what unites us but what divides us. Jo’s killing was political, it was an act of terror designed to advance an agenda of hatred towards others. What a beautiful irony it is that an act designed to advance hatred has instead generated such an outpouring of love. Jo lived for her beliefs, and on Thursday she died for them, and for the rest of our lives we will fight for them in her name.”

Many in Market Place wept openly as those words were spoken, and it was difficult to imagine anyone who could have listened to that speech, and then voted to leave the European Union. But the next evening, as the polls closed, many told me they had done just that. At the Batley Conservative Club, a vast and formerly grand establishment at odds with its dwindling clientele of mostly old, white men, two members, named Darren and Stuart (they declined to offer their surnames), sat at the bar discussing how they had both voted Leave. Darren knew Jo Cox from school and said she was “a lovely lass.” But both men spoke repeatedly about how they had been let down by politicians, particularly on the issue of immigration. Their complaint did not just concern the recent migrants from the E.U. but the older Muslim residents of Batley. Darren put his wish to leave the E.U. partly down to “the change in the town and the feeling in the town. There are certain people who don’t integrate.” Stuart said that “it’s a sad thing what happened last week,” but added, “We just want our country back.” Both men expected the “Jo Cox thing” to have “skewed” the result toward Remain, but they still expected a majority in the district to have voted Leave.