Cox murder: white noise and deception

I hope I am not alone in my incomprehension, but I am struggling to establish what we actually know for a fact about yesterday's events. Reports of what eyewitnesses have said have been misreported and there are wild inconsistencies between sources. There is also a degree of exploitation going on.

The Telegraph reports that "Mrs Cox's death comes three months after a man was cautioned for sending her "malicious communications", but police have confirmed this was not the same man who was arrested on Thursday following the attack. "The man subsequently accepted a police caution. The man who accepted the police caution is not the man in custody in West Yorkshire."

This did not stop the T from carrying a headline for two hours, implying that the barrage of hate-mail was from the same individual. Only if you delve deep into one of the T's crass live blogs, from very early this morning, do we find any clarity. And naturally, though this added information adds nothing to our understanding of events, the DM insists on carrying the same dishonest headline.

We are still seeing an amplification of spurious links with far right organisations, made all the more useless by the media's complete debasement of the term "far-right", having applied the term to anyone who isn't Labour. It may be a factor, it may not. All we do know is that the implied connection with Brexit is entirely opportunistic exploitation.

Since they can't get their stories straight between them, on the basis of the reports available, there is little point in even attempting to establish what has happened. Late last night some sources suggest that Cox was not even the target and instead was intervening in a dispute. Meanwhile the notion of a home-made gun seems implausible on account of three rapid shots.

I suppose if there is any point at all in this post it is that what we are getting from our media is white noise and pure speculation, leaden with deliberate and unhelpful sensationalising innuendo. The reports are EVM. Extruded Verbal Material.

I am more certain now that Mrs Cox she was the intended target but am not absolutely convinced of that. All we have is badly written noise which doesn't pass for journalism or even effective reporting. Our newspapers have chimpanzees as editors with all the morals of a scorpion. We will have to wait before we get anything close to the truth.

It is left to social media to bring any kind of clarity to events and the interpretation. And in the spirit of my earlier piece, on a slight tangent, one comment on Facebook succinctly surrounds the issue of the political fallout. Describing not the motives of the attack, but the public mood which Polly Toynbee asserts is behind this incident...

Polly Toynbee is one of the best examples of a UK ruling elite who are completely out of touch with the people. This situation has developed because they have pulled up the political drawbridge on us and retreated into the Westminster Bubble. Declaring that we are racists, xenophobes and bigots is a mantra they have to keep on repeating to explain why they are unpopular. The very genuine desire for millions of working class people to get more control over their lives, to get a better standard of living, gets translated into racism and bigotry by the ruling elite.

Jo Cox was one of an increasingly small number of MP's who grew up in and lived in the constituency she represented. But more to the point it is the political classes withdrawal from politics, of any meaningful attempt to address our problems that has opened up a huge gulf between us and them.

That's precisely why the UK ruling elite rely on the institution of the EU to fill their authority gap. If we really want to get some democratic accountability then we have to shift the balance back in our favour. We need politicians who have a positive political view of where we want society to go. We need some inspiring politics. This a world away from the desperate doom and gloom outlook of our 'political class'. A vote to leave the EU can be the first step towards a new positive political culture.

I have nothing further to add. Our politics is utterly debased, and in that vacuum the media has turned in on itself to become as much a part of the problem. The persistence of this narrative that our establishment is the victim and not the architect is why we may yet see for real that which Toynbee pretends has occurred. While they show complete incomprehension as to what motivates the vitriol directed at them, they cannot begin to devise a way out.