We have just this last weekend commemorated the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War. Indeed we have all been paying tribute to everyone who has lost their lives or whose lives were damaged by armed conflict over the last century. We commit to never forgetting and always honouring the sacrifices of all. And when we do this, we often link this to the freedoms that we all enjoy.
I am sure there are many historians here who know this better than me: but in my view the freedoms we have, come not just from the winning of wars. Our freedoms have also been hard won through political campaigning, legislation & our justice system, non-violent protest and, of course, constant vigilance.
We live in tempestuous times where the pillars of our free democracy here and abroad are being shaken by terrorism, attacks on the free press and triumphant but myopic populism. The freedoms to think, to believe, to declare, to debate, to challenge, to satirise and to complain (etc!) are precious ones which we must protect with all our might.
One person who did this for all of her life was Jo Cox MP. As we all know, she was brutally murdered by a Right Wing Terrorist during the European Referendum campaign of 2016. And it is because of her that I am with you today.
Jo stood up for freedom and against the ‘othering’ of people. She stood for community and common interests and against the suppression of ideas and the oppression of people.
When Jo was killed, it was a moment that shocked and saddened me deeply, as it did most other people of course. Here was an MP working hard to listen to and help her constituents in Batley and Spen. She was on her way to a regular surgery on 16 June 2016 when a man stabbed and killed her. As the world reacted to this event, much more about Jo became to be more widely understood.
In particular a paragraph from her maiden speech in the House of Commons delivered by her on 3 June 2015, just a year previous, became well known:
“Batley and Spen is a gathering of typically independent, no-nonsense and proud Yorkshire towns and villages. Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir. While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.”
Just to repeat that last bit:
“we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.”
And so wind forward another year and the general election of 2017 was called. I placed a bet of £20 on how many seats the Conservative Party would win (within a 25 seat margin) at odds of seven to one.
I was right and I won my stake and £140 back. So then I thought, what should I do with the money? I could have blown it all on a night out or given it to a charity. But I decided instead to purchase 11 copies of the book about Jo’s amazing life and tragic death. And I decided at the same time to donate ten of these books to the libraries of my life.
The weekend before last, I donated one book to the Mouvaux Library, our twin town in Flanders. There are many Flanders fields around Mouvaux…
And here I am on stage nine of my journey. (I have one more stop to go: the Buckingham School). It gives me enormous pleasure to offer this book to your library here at the University. It is also pleasing, of course, that proceeds from the book have all been going to the Jo Cox Foundation, a charity that I know Sir Anthony is very supportive of. Indeed the profits from his last two books have gone there too.
Inside the book will be this bookplate:
Thank you for allowing me to do this.
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