Tributes to the refugees’ champion Jo Cox coincided with the start of Refugee Week. Her example of joined-up thinking is vital, says the Jesuit Refugee Service UK director

This week has been Refugee Week. Festivities got off to a rather subdued start on Monday; refugees had lost a champion in Parliament with the death of Jo Cox, murdered outside her constituency surgery. As an aid worker, she had seen the plight of refugees at first hand in places such as Darfur. She understood lives steeped in back stories of violence and persecution, grief and loss.

Jo Cox’s description of the diversity of her constituency as a place “where people have more in common than that which divides us” went viral after her death, and seemed to uncover a yearning for connection obscured by the recent European Union referendum debate.

Such a yearning runs counter to recent moves by Home Secretary Theresa May, who has begun to differentiate actively between refugees abroad in camps and those seeking protection on our doorstep. She has announced her intention to disentangle the types of protection offered to each, such that those who arrive in the United Kingdom under their own steam and apply for asylum would no longer get the right to settle permanently – that being available only to those refugees the Government chooses for resettlement from camps.