Ours is a beautiful country. Its mountains may not be as high as some, but they have an ancient careworn beauty that exists nowhere else in the world. Our rivers may not be as broad as they might be, but they are blue and green-banked and sinuous. Our forests may be reduced and groomed, but they are filled with calm light and birdsong. Our fields are clipped and tended and bound by hedges and stone walls a thousand years old. They are the essence of stability and order.
Under those stone-walled and tilled fields, there is a dragon lurking. Most of the time it sleeps deep under the Earth. But sometimes it's restless. Sometimes it shivers and curls under the land threatening to emerge. It's the beast that we have distilled out of our Viking ancestors, out of the worst, forgotten atrocities of the Normans, the savage and doomed effectiveness of Iceni warrior princesses, from the aggression of the Angles and the Saxons. In more primitive times, it served us well. Sometimes it rules us and it has been a long time in chains. So long that we've forgotten that it's there. Its chains have rusted away and those tasked to be vigilant have become negligent. Yesterday the dragon twitched an eyebrow.
Please let Jo Cox's murder be a heeded-warning, not an overture.