THE FUNERAL OF murdered Labour MP Jo Cox has taken place this afternoon.
Cox was shot twice and stabbed close to a library near Leeds on 16 June.
The MP for Batley and Spen had been hosting an advice clinic at a library in Birstall, Yorkshire when she was grabbed by the hair and attacked by 52-year-old Thomas Mair.
Prior to her funeral today, and in the aftermath of last night’s terror attack in Nice which left 84 people dead, her husband Brendan tweeted an emotional tribute to his wife:
“Jo would ask us not to fight hate with hate but draw together to drain the swamp that extremism breeds in,” he said.
“Thinking of all victims of hatred today.”
Cox’s constituents of Batley and Spen turned out in force for the funeral cortege, with thousands lining the streets of Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire, where she grew up.
As her hearse passed, children from a primary school threw white roses at the cortege.
The funeral itself was a private, family ceremony.
In Batley, the town which Cox represented, a message was attached in a plastic wallet on a lamp-post.
It said simply: “Today I pledge to #LoveLikeJo I will.”
One constituent, Janet Hartley, told the Guardian she had been left “devastated” by her killing.
“Other politicians get other people to do it but she came herself,” 57-year-old Hartley said of a meeting she had with Cox prior to last year’s UK general election.
She took time to listen to you, even if you were telling her about quite personal, private things that had nothing to do with the government.”
Thomas Mair was arrested and charged with Jo Cox’s murder two days after she died.
His trial begins in November.
Cox had been elected to Parliament at the first time of asking after last year’s election.
She lived with her husband Brendan and their two children, aged three and five, on a houseboat moored on the River Thames in London, close to the city’s iconic Tower Bridge.
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