More than 100 cyclists set off on ride to remember murdered MP Jo Cox
Cheered on by Mrs Cox's parents and sister, MP Kim Leadbeater, the group gathered at Princess Mary Athletics Stadium, in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire, on Wednesday morning to follow her journey to London in the tenth Jo Cox Way event.
The annual ride aims to keep alive the legacy of the Batley and Spen Labour MP – who was killed by a far-right terrorist in June 2016 – by championing the causes she was passionate about.
This year's ride marks the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage, with riders wearing the purple, white and green colours of the suffragettes.
They left the stadium just after 9.30am to cheers from crowds, including Ms Leadbeater, now the MP for Spen Valley.
She said: 'Jo was a passionate campaigner for gender equality so it's wonderful to see nearly 60 women riding this year and showing that cycling really is for everyone.
'It's a tough challenge but a brilliant five days – everything Jo would have loved.
'It's also a great way to meet people from different walks of life and to celebrate that we have 'more in common', as Jo said in her maiden speech in Parliament 10 years ago.
'Cycling has so many physical and mental health benefits and also helps combat loneliness and isolation, causes which Jo cared about deeply.
'My mum, dad and I wish all the cyclists the very best of luck on their epic journey.'
The cyclists are due to arrive in Buxton in Derbyshire on Wednesday evening and will reach Flat Iron Square in London on Sunday, following Jo Cox's journey from growing up in the Spen Valley to representing the area in Westminster.
Ken Avery, from Liversedge, 76, who has terminal cancer, is taking part. His daughter rode alongside him as he left the stadium on Wednesday morning, and his son will ride with him in London.
He said: 'I think they're both proud of me because I'm doing something that I enjoy and it's keeping me fit and healthy.'
The youngest rider this year is 21, and the oldest, Kath Lyons from Skipton, celebrates her 80th birthday a month after the ride.
She said: 'You see so much hatred on social media these days, people hide behind it. I'm doing the Jo Cox Way again to remind myself what Jo stood for – it's more relevant now than when she said it.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
4 hours ago
- Times
Boost growth or tackle crime? Flip-flopping will hamper both
There must be a sense of motion sickness at Companies House. Included in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 was a swathe of provisions intended not only to improve the quality of information on the register, but also to fight back against the use of UK corporate entities in economic crime. But no sooner was it confirmed in July that one such reform — significantly increasing the amount of filing required by small and micro companies — would shortly be implemented, it emerged that Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, was minded to scrap it as part of Labour's assault on red tape. This apparent reversal — not a U-turn, given it was implemented by the previous government — sat rather oddly with the announcement a fortnight later of a major operation between Companies House, the National Crime Agency and other agencies to strike off 11,500 non-compliant companies and target the businesses involved in their formation and management. Those within Companies House must be asking: are we clamping down on fraud or reducing compliance obligations? Those goals are not mutually exclusive — but the effect of the 2023 reforms has been a deliberate lurch away from Companies House as a repository of information to an enforcement agency with significant responsibility with respect to economic crime. That may sound sensible, but the approach skips over the question of whether it is remotely equipped for the task. Of the 150-odd offences contained within the Companies Act 2006, only one — failure to file accounts and reports — is prosecuted with any consistency. Approximately half the civil penalties for late filings go uncollected. Those who deal with Companies House regularly know that correspondence sent today is unlikely to receive a response in the next fortnight, no matter the urgency. Cases easily resolved without proceedings must often wait until the parties are actually at court before a sensible discussion can be had. A significant amount of expectation — and statutory power — has been piled onto Companies House, but that is only half the equation. The same concerns must also arise for the Insolvency Service, which has recently announced its own five-year plan to make economic crime a core part of its work. The idea that either organisation is capable of becoming a serious player in combating fraud and money-laundering — in addition to their core mandates — in the near future is bold. Fighting complex financial crime is hard (just look at the mixed fortunes of the Serious Fraud Office), requiring infrastructure and institutional experience that cannot be acquired in the short-term or with the drag of political flip-flopping. As long as Companies House is pulled in different policy directions — cleaning up UK plc while also reducing friction for business — it will struggle to achieve the transformation expected. Nick Barnard is a partner at the law firm Corker Binning
Telegraph
7 hours ago
- Telegraph
Six in 10 young people fear becoming victims of violent crime
Six in 10 young people fear they could become victims of violence in their communities, a new study has found. The poll of 1,338 adults aged 18 to 30 revealed that 61 per cent were concerned about violent crime where they lived, irrespective of their political allegiance. Sixty-seven per cent of both Labour and Reform UK voters said they feared becoming victims of violence in their areas. The Adam Smith Institute, which commissioned the research, said the findings were a 'wake-up call' about a 'generation that feels increasingly unsafe in their own homes'. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that the number of violent offences reported to police has increased over the past decade, although the ONS says this is largely the result of better recording of crime by police. Knife crime has also risen since the Covid pandemic to near record levels, with younger people disproportionately more likely to be victims. The British crime survey, which measures people's actual experience of crime, shows that violence has steadily declined over the past decade by 36 per cent to some 1.1 million incidents of violence with or without injury. However, this has not changed young people's perception of violent crime as having increased. 'Violent crime, from knife attacks to robberies, is no longer seen as an isolated issue affecting certain parts of the country; it is a pervasive threat that cuts across ethnic and political lines,' said the Adam Smith Institute. 'For many, the perception that crime is rising and that public safety is deteriorating is only reinforced by the government's failure to tackle these issues effectively. When young people across the political spectrum agree on the same fear, it's clear that Britain's public safety crisis can no longer be ignored.' Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said: 'Successive Labour and Conservative governments have run down our criminal justice system and left Britons to pay the price. We now live in a country where violent criminals and sex offenders receive shockingly short sentences, while ordinary citizens are prosecuted for social media posts. 'Only Reform UK will invest in our police force, enforce zero-tolerance policing and restore proper justice, where the punishment truly fits the crime.' Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: 'Young people often bear the brunt of some crime types, such as knife crime and phone snatches. Crime has gone up under Labour and Labour has cut police numbers, with more cuts coming this year. 'Labour won't properly back tactics like stop and search which are proven to make streets safer. And in London, Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan has completely lost control of crime, is presiding over crashing declines in police numbers and is shutting police stations. Labour is letting young people – and everyone – down on crime.' Emma Schubart, the data and insights manager at the Adam Smith Institute, said: 'Our findings should be a wake-up call for anyone still in denial about the state of public safety in the UK. 'When 61 per cent of young Britons, across all backgrounds and political affiliations, are genuinely afraid of violent crime in their communities, we have a serious problem. And the numbers don't lie: knife crime is soaring, robberies are up, and violent crime is no longer just an urban issue, it's everywhere. 'The fact that this crisis is being ignored or dismissed by politicians, particularly those who prefer to label concerned citizens as far-Right, only adds fuel to the fire. People are fed up. This is a generation living in fear, and it's time for the Government to stop playing political games and take action. Enough is enough.' A Home Office spokesman said: 'No one should live in fear of being a victim of violent crime. We are determined to make our streets safer, using every tool available to prevent harm and bring offenders to justice. 'We are investing in frontline policing, expanding Violence Reduction Units, and supporting early intervention programmes that steer young people away from crime. Through targeted enforcement and community-led prevention, we are working to build safer streets and protect communities across the UK. 'This will be further supported by an extra 13,000 neighbourhood officers across England and Wales by the end of this Parliament and providing the police with a £1.2 billion increase in funding this year.'
Times
8 hours ago
- Times
Ignoring prison crisis won't make it go away
Of all the bin fires raging across government last summer that might have prompted Rishi Sunak to chuck it in and call an election, the problem of Britain's overflowing prisons was one of the fiercest. And now we learn just how fierce, thanks to a review that reveals jails repeatedly came within three days of being officially 'full' in the two years before the election, until ministers finally came to the rescue with a brilliant scheme simply to release criminals earlier. Labour ministers no doubt feel sore about it. It was they who ended up releasing offenders like Isaac Donkoh, a gang leader convicted of kidnapping and torturing a teenage boy; or Lawson Natty, convicted of manslaughter for killing a 14-year-old boy; or Jason Hoganson, released early in error and, within a day, back to assaulting his ex-partner. These were not the headlines with which a party in possession of a stunning victory wanted to launch its 'decade of renewal'. The government can now happily point to the review by Dame Anne Owers in arguing that the lucky breaks handed to Donkoh and co were at least a decade in the making, with more than a walk-on part for Tory cuts and the unfailingly cloddish machinations of one Chris Grayling, a name that shall serve for ever as a watchword for misbegotten numbskull-duggery. Dame Anne was the doyenne of the jailhouse under Blair, serving as chief prisons inspector from 2001 to 2010. And it's probably fair to say that the 'tough on crime' brigade would not share all her views. But her report reads as bland fact rather than polemic. Besides, she has been warning about a prison capacity crunch since the Blair days. The Tories trumpeted her first warning in early 2007, when David Cameron accused the then-government of having 'stuck its head in the sand'. They don't make sandpits deep enough for the Tory justice ministers and Treasury officials since then who have pretended to believe the prison population is not going to keep growing despite repeatedly adopting policies that fuel population growth and tougher sentencing. The result, as described by Dame Anne, is 'a cycle of prison capacity crises'. While the prison population rose most sharply under Labour, from 66,300 in 2001 to 85,002 in 2010, it has kept rising since, to 87,726 last year. Whereas there used to be more women, children and young men in jail, and more men serving short sentences, the past decade has seen fewer women and many fewer children locked up, with more capacity filled by older men serving longer sentences. The exception is the backlog of people sitting in jail while waiting for a court date, which now accounts for a fifth of prisoners, compared to a seventh in 2015. Despite promises to be tough on crime, the 2010 coalition found it convenient to adopt projections saying that more prison space wouldn't be needed. The Treasury had no intention of releasing cash to build prisons — and indeed, was keen to save money by selling them off and laying off experienced prison officers. First Ken Clarke and then Grayling both appear to have connived in the delusion, so that by 2017, the system was running with fewer than 1,000 free places. Under the radar, more criminals were tagged or detained at home under curfew rather than being jailed. For a short time, things stabilised, though another crunch was coming when Covid hit. Afterwards, with Boris Johnson's thousands of extra police officers on the beat and the courts jammed up, things started to spiral. Day-to-day work at the Ministry of Justice was taken over by all sorts of special committees and meetings, in which frazzled officials crunched the numbers to work out exactly how Donald Ducked the whole system was and then, having found it was indeed just days from catastrophe, sounding the alarm. In these emergency phases, officials, police and prison officers would kick off the first of several rounds of a sliding puzzle game at 5.30am each day, shunting prisoners frantically between police cells, crowded jails and court rooms, a task in which, as the review puts it, 'the marker of success was 'whether everyone got a bed last night''. The costs were wild: filling a proper prison cell costs the Treasury £150 a night, whereas a police cell costs £688, with the result that the government has spent £70 million and counting on not having enough jail space. The usual congratulations are due to the Treasury for its characteristic forethought in generating such staggeringly expensive savings. Obviously, something had to give, and that something was the enforcement of judge-given sentences. There were two chaotic early release schemes, the first at the end of the Tory government and the second at the start of Labour's. Already stretched probation officers scrambled to assess who could be released and when, under various overlapping criteria, sometimes at a few hours' notice — followed by a dash to arrange the services meant to help stop an ex-convict falling instantly back into a life of crime, like addiction treatment or temporary accommodation. Similar stress in the probation service means monitoring all this properly is basically impossible. Even if you are among those who believe in locking up fewer people, it is clear that a country with a growing population and decades of overcrowded jails needs more prisons. Less crowded jails are safer, better able to police violence and drugs and more likely to rehabilitate at least some of the population. So why haven't we been building them? It's a different face to the same old problem: we can't build anything. It has always been a bit more expensive to house people in prisons than houses, but the cost gap is now absurd. Per person housed, it costs about six times more to build a jail than it would to build them each a one-bedroom flat. There are environmental regulation, shortages of building materials and workers and so on, but even where big capital spending has been earmarked for prisons, it doesn't get spent because of a 'major block', as Dame Anne calls it, within the government's own control: planning. Even with prisons full and dangerous criminals being released prematurely to cope, it is still taking prison projects at least two years to get planning permission. Usually, it takes longer. Three major projects first proposed in 2020 only made it through the process with the help of central government rulings four years later. It does not take a statistician to see that at this rate, more offenders will go free earlier and earlier before anything changes. A few weeks ago, the Tories were out promising a 'zero-tolerance' approach to petty crime. Unfortunately for them, the country has zero tolerance for this dipstickery. There are neither enough prisons, nor probation officers nor court hours to punish all the people they want to put away. 'Tough on crime' requires building on time, and they didn't.
