DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Don’t play politics with this senseless tragedy

• e-mail

Jo Cox (pictured) was an exceptional woman, with a loving heart, who went into politics with the wholly selfless aims of serving the Yorkshire community

On one point, everyone who came into contact with Jo Cox – from every part of the political spectrum – is unanimous.

She was an exceptional woman, with a loving heart, who went into politics with the wholly selfless aims of serving the Yorkshire community in which she grew up and doing what she could to make this a kinder and better world.

Rising from modest beginnings to her work for Oxfam and a seat in Parliament, she was a huge credit to her parents, teachers, family and country.

More than anything, her murder on Thursday was an appalling waste and tragedy – first and foremost for her two young children, her husband and those closest to her, but also for her constituents and the country to which she had so much to offer, in what promised to be a remarkable political career.

A second point on which you would hope everyone would agree is that her killing was utterly senseless.

Indeed, every indication so far suggests it was the work of a seriously disturbed loner, with a long history of mental problems, who was attracted to a neo-Nazi group in the US.

You would also expect most reasonable people to agree that this apparently deranged act has no light to throw on the question voters will have to decide next Thursday.

As Mrs Cox’s Labour colleague and friend Rachel Reeves put it: ‘We don’t know what the motives were of the guy who attacked her yesterday. I don’t think we should link the referendum to Jo’s death.’

Yet sickeningly, this hasn’t stopped some in the Remain camp trying to make political capital from the murder by insidiously implying that Brexit campaigners bear a share of the responsibility for it.

With what can only be described as moral imbecility, an editorial in yesterday’s Guardian leapt from mourning Mrs Cox’s death to castigating Brexit for highlighting public concerns about mass immigration.

Meanwhile, the paper’s increasingly eccentric columnist Polly Toynbee blamed Leave campaigners for creating the ‘ugly public mood’ in which the attack happened (as if Remainers have spread sweetness and light with their cries of racism and talk of genocide and world war).

She even exploited Jo Cox’s death to call for the sacking of Michael Gove, ludicrously comparing this very liberal Justice Secretary with Enoch Powell.

Couldn’t it equally be argued (and with similarly grotesque wrong-headedness) that the liberal Left has Mrs Cox’s blood on its hands after decades of inflaming public frustration by suppressing debate on immigration – something which has led to the emergence of ugly far-Right and far-Left groups across Europe.

Some in the Remain camp are trying to make political capital from the murder by insidiously implying that Brexit campaigners bear a share of the responsibility for it. Ms Cox is pictured last month 

Others, too, have sought to score political points, with Labour’s Neil Coyle pinning the blame partly on ‘dangerous material’ published by the Leave campaign, while EU commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos declares that the MP laid down her life because of her ‘dedication to European democracy’.

But by attributing such weighty political meaning to her killing, don’t they risk dignifying a brutally mindless act?

Yes, there is something especially repugnant about the murder of an MP. But in this case, it seems almost trite and overblown to call it an ‘offence against democracy’, as many did yesterday.

It will only become such an offence if the democratic process is suspended for too long, with the campaign put on hold because of this ghastly act.

We cannot believe that this is what Mrs Cox, who clearly cared passionately about democracy, would have wanted.