This is more deeply felt in Britain than in almost any other country, because we worked all this out long ago. In his brilliant book, The English and Their History, published in 2014, Professor Robert Tombs tells the story of the rise of parliamentary government in England (which gradually extended to the whole of the United Kingdom). By the early 18th century, he writes, “Foreign admirers thought that England had somehow stumbled on a working political system which both encouraged and was sustained by science, commerce, reason and liberty.” I found it touching that flowers in Birstall in memory of Jo Cox were placed on the statue of its most famous son, Joseph Priestley, the 18th-century political radical and discoverer of oxygen. Priestley embodied those sustaining qualities.

Until the late 20th century, Britain never really stumbled off the political system Professor Tombs describes. The franchise spread from a couple of hundred thousand property-owners to the entire adult population. Contrary to the fears of the elites, this did not produce mob rule. Very rarely then or – despite the death of Jo Cox – now, has it led to murder. The people chose their lawmakers peacefully and sent them to Parliament. From those chosen, a government was formed. When the people grew tired of those they had put in, they got rid of them and put in others. The classic example was in 1945, when the people voted out their war hero, Winston Churchill, in a Labour landslide. Right or wrong, this was a confident, orderly assertion of the popular will that only parliamentary democracy can sustain.