Jo Cox’s murder has inspired far more love than the hatred that killed her, her husband has said in an emotional tribute at a celebration of the murdered MP’s life on what would have been her 42nd birthday.
More than 10,000 people gathered in Trafalgar Square in London. The couple’s favourite band, Diddley Dee, who performed at Cox’s wedding, played at the event.
Each touch at the event, named More In Common in a nod to the words of Cox's maiden speech in the Commons, was intensely personal. U2 frontman Bono, who admired Cox's work with Oxfam, recorded a tribute song, and Lily Allen performed Somewhere Only We Know, which the family sang at the holiday cottage on the river Wye.
Children from the school of Cox's five-year-old son sang the civil rights anthem If I Had A Hammer.
Brendan Cox, his voice catching, called his wife’s death “an act of terror designed to advance hatred against others”, adding: “What a beautiful irony it is that an act designed to advance hatred has instead generated such an outpouring of love.”
Friends and former colleagues of Ms Cox also gathered in a concert hall in central Brussels on Wednesday to honour the life of the Labour MP who died following a violent attack in her Yorkshire constituency last Thursday.
Ms Cox moved to Brussels in the late 1990s when she worked for Labour MEP Glenys Kinnock and as a director for the charity Oxfam.
Britain’s EU commissioner Jonathan Hill was among those in attendance at the hour-long event which celebrated the life of the former Brussels-resident through music, poetry and speech.
Addressing hundreds of people who had gathered in Ancienne Belgique, a popular concert venue in central Brussels, Tom Brookes, who knew Jo Cox when she lived in Brussels, said that she had "lived by and fought for the values of an inclusive and loving world every day . . . Being around Jo was an inspiration in how to be positive . . . Where she saw a wrong committed she would fight to set it right, and fight hard."
A live feed of the multi-faith event held in London to mark the life of the MP was broadcast in the central-Brussels venue, including an emotional speech by her husband, Brendan Cox.
Among the performers at the Brussels event were Quotob Project, a band founded by Syrian cellist Bassel Abou Fakher and Refugees got Talent, a Brussels-based project that brings together artists, musicians, writers and artists from the refugee community.
A Brussels choir sang Ederlezi, a Balkan folk song, in a tribute to Jo Cox's connections with the region where she spent many summers working in an orphanage in Sarajevo with her husband Brendan.
Eloise Todd, a friend of the Labour MP from her time in Brussels, read the speech delivered by Glenys Kinnock in the Houses of Parliament following her death, which paid tribute to her former employee's mix of "high intelligence, gaiety, bravery and kindness."
Belgian poet Dorothy Oger read I shall stand for love, a poem written in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Brussels on March 22nd. " I shall stand for love for the world is wounded . . . because we need more light, not more death," she read. "I will stand for love so that our children may be safe, our friends sheltered, our borders open."
