The Jo Cox Killing Marks a Brexit Turning Point

This article first appeared on the American Enterprise Institute site.

In the week preceding the horrific killing of Jo Cox, the Labour MP for the Batley and Spen constituency in Yorkshire, opinion polls were indicating that the campaign for the U.K. to leave the European Union was headed for a victory, in some cases by as much as 7 percentage points.

Betting markets indicated a probability of a Leave win of over 40 percent—implying a very tight race. Following last week's tragedy, those gains seem gone. On Monday, betting markets were showing only a 24 percent chance of a Leave victory.

Hopefully, this tragedy will mark also a turning point of a different kind. When asked his name in court, Cox's suspected killer replied, "Death to traitors. Freedom for Britain."

Without suggesting that either of the two ideological camps bears responsibility for the twisted decisions of a man with a history of mental problems and connections to neo-Nazi groups, it feels appropriate to reflect on the intense and emotionally charged campaigning that the U.K. has seen for the past five months, and hope that the memory of tragedy will help restore some degree of civility to political discussions.

Scottish journalist Alex Massie observed in the immediate aftermath of the killing:

Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they're too slow to realize any of this is happening, that their problem is they're not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.

Of course, the vilification of political opponents is not an exclusive domain of any party or political campaign. (If you doubt that, skim the opinion pages of The Guardian, where hyperbolic charges are addressed at the Conservative Party on an almost daily basis.)

Yet, the recent low points of the campaign have been invariably associated with the Leave side: the grotesque conspiracy theory about the supposed influence of Goldman Sachs on the governor of Bank of England, Mark Carney; the attempt to link Orlando killings to the U.K.'s EU membership; or the awful "Breaking Point" poster, unveiled on the day of Cox's killing.

It hardly surprised anyone when one of the Brexit campaigners shouted last week: "Hitler did it with gas! Merkel does it with paperwork!"

Nothing new to the American audience here. The "habit of the lip," as the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls it, affects real-world outcomes—for the better and for the worse.

Regardless of where one stands on the issue of the U.K.'s EU membership, it is high time the bitter partisanship we are now seeing on both sides of the Atlantic be scaled back in a way that will move us from "a ghastly holy war of ideologies" towards a genuine competition of ideas.

Dalibor Rohac is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.