Capital

As expected the media is awash with reports, blogs and columns purporting to pin the killing of Jo Cox firmly on Nigel Farage's political career. Polly Toynbee in particular is so convinced that Ukip and its sympathisers are nothing short of Nazis in corduroy that she has trotted out her usual line on bigotry. Typically, she can't (or won't) bring herself to confront the truths of human nature, preferring to promulgate the pitifully transparent lie that the nasty people are on the right and her people are blameless.

The statement put out by Brendan Cox very soon after Jo's death also strikes a mood of conflict between the values she stood for and the assumed motivation of the killer. Not only should he have not been pressed to make such a declaration so soon afterwards, it is a bold assumption based on conflicting accounts of what actually happened. The presumption of this being a hate crime is very much from the Toynbee rule book.

Thomas Mair, the shooter, appears to have a long history of mental illness and detachment from society. His politics, it is said, are unknown and he seems to have no history of activism. A random act? A planned assassination? An intended confrontation gone wrong? A case of wrong place, wrong time? At the time of writing, none of this is know, but Toynbee knows. She also knows that in the world of making political capital you strike while the iron is hot. Brendan O'Neill's condemnation of such action clearly failed to reach her. To save you reading her hateful article I have paraphrased it here:

Meanwhile post-vigil (every death has to have a public vigil nowadays) people are tentatively returning to the referendum campaign trail and carefully choosing their words. Some are less sober in their condemnation of Leave supporters and are determined to use Jo Cox as an emblem of Little England divisiveness, gleefully seeing this as a turning point in the recent decline of the Remain vote. I hope it changes nothing and that people stick to their guns, because were the possibility of freeing a whole nation from its chains to turn on the exploitation of sentiment following the death of a single individual that would be tragedy on a wholly different scale.