Brexit: Leave campaign faces difficulties after Jo Cox’s death

Both sides in Britain's EU referendum suspended their campaigns as soon as they heard about the fatal attack on Labour MP Jo Cox on Thursday. But within hours of her death, her party colleague Neil Coyle linked the murder to the rhetoric employed by the Leave campaign.

“I think that the kind of nonsense that they inspire online from anonymous accounts and actually the core content of the poster they launched today, look at what they are putting out and I just think that they are a very dangerous, and they risk inspiring extremist elements on the hard right in this country,” he told the BBC.

Other Labour politicians and pro-Remain journalists have also placed Ms Cox’s killing in the context of the harsh language and coarsened political discourse of the referendum campaign. But with both campaigns suspended until Sunday, it remains to be seen which campaign benefits or suffers in the aftermath of the murder.

Remain campaigners fear that the campaign has been frozen at a moment when the Leave campaign was ahead in the polls, leaving the pro-EU side less time to persuade wavering voters to stick with the status quo. But the silence of leading Leave campaigners Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage suggests that they too are nervous.

Remain campaigners are, for the most part, tip-toeing around any possible link between the murder suspect’s far-right connections and the pro-Brexit campaign. But pro-EU proxies in the media are less shy about laying the blame on the Leave campaign, if not on the murder itself, on the political environment in which it happened.

When they emerge from the moratorium on campaigning, the Leave side will find it more difficult to push their anti-establishment, anti-politician agenda in the wake of the murder of an elected representative. The Remain campaign’s hope lies less in the prospect of the Leave campaign being blamed for the murder than in a change in the tone of the debate.

If voters decide that they want a more sober debate around the issues in the EU referendum, they may also take a more considered, less emotional approach to the issues. Such a change of attitude could boost the Remain side by prompting voters to opt for the status quo rather than making a gesture of hostility towards their elected representatives.