JO Cox was remembered last night as thousands gathered at vigils all over the country to pay tribute to the Labour politician brutally murdered on Thursday afternoon.

Among the crowd of 300 gathered in Glasgow’s George Square there were politicians from the SNP, the Tories, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats.

But it was the Labour family who were there in the greatest numbers. MSPs, former MPs, party staff and activists, trade unionists, all there to remember one of their own.

Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader, said Cox was the “very best example of why women in politics matters”.

“She was tough, by God she was tough,” Dugdale said. “She worked in war zones from Afghanistan to Palestine, the Congo to the Sudan. I’ve always believed it takes a tough skin to be in politics, but you can’t have one so tough that you forget to feel the power of emotion, that rawness, that understanding people’s real lives. Being able to make a difference because of what you’ve experienced and heard.

“Jo Cox got that balance absolutely right. That balance between raw emotion and a tough, tough skin. She needed more than a tough skin, she needed an armour to face down that that brutal and violent attack that took her life.

“I hope that in the days and weeks ahead the loss of Jo Cox’s life, the end of her life, becomes a new beginning for her politics.”

In George Square, the crowd swelled. People just wanted to be here at this act of remembrance.

They were angry. They were angry about the attack on democracy and the attempt to silence it that, to many, Cox’s murder represents.

And they were angry about the way Britain has been doing politics of late, angry at the tone of the EU referendum, angry that someone connected to the far-right could, in Britain, in 2016, kill a politician.

They were furious that, for the second time in the space of a week, there was a vigil in George Square. It’s only been four days since Glaswegians turned up in their hundreds to remember those killed in the attack on the LGBTI community in the Pulse gay club in Orlando. And now, they were here, again. Remembering, again, someone killed at the hands of an angry, aggressive man.

Hazel Nolan from Hope Not Hate said it was insulting to the memory of Cox to suggest that this murder was not political: “Jo Cox stood for something and she died for it. We cannot and should not de-politicise it. Instead we need to stare the ugliness of it in the face, pretending it’s not there will not make it go away.”

She continued: “The man who politically assassinated Jo Cox was a long and committed fascist. But what was it that tipped her murderer over the edge and emboldened him to act now? The truth is that there is a battle going in Britain between those who say there is an us and them and that we must choose. Jo Cox didn’t believe in an us and them, she believed there was only an us.”

More than the anger though was the grief. An overwhelming sadness that Cox’s two young children, Cuillin and Lejla, would not get their mum back.

An emotional Nicola Sturgeon was in tears as she told the crowd: “Above all of those things she was a young mother of two children and I will be one of only millions of people who find it difficult to hold it together every time I think of those young children right now.”

There were at least 20 vigils held last night, including one in Edinburgh attended by Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson and Labour MP Ian Murray.

More are planned for today. Aberdeen Labour have organised a vigil in the city’s Union Terrace Gardens at 12.30pm.