I do not intend to add anything to the numerous encomiums on Mr. Hume, but to discuss the wider historical context in which his political career originated. Although it is not my habit to draw attention to 'lessons of history', it is impossible to ignore something when it is staring you in the face. He came to prominence through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, a protest against conditions of discrimination, gerrymandering and segregation in Northern Ireland. These conditions had persisted since 1922 partly because the British state chose to ignore them, even when Stormont publicly boasted of its bias. (This may have been due to uneasy memories of the Unionist armed insurrection that almost happened, aided and abetted by Andrew Bonar Law and the Conservative Party, just before the First World War). As Chris Patten candidly states in his autobiography, 'First confession: a sort of memoir' (2017): 'As ever, we tend to forget about Northern Ireland.' A significant part of Hume's that achievement lay in convincing British politicians that it was criminal to forget Northern Ireland.
All the babble about 'Global Britain' has tended to obscure the fact that Britain is itself a multinational entity, a 'North East Atlantic Archipelago', and that its existence is gravely threatened by Brexit. The common membership of the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom of the EU has been part of the glue that has held the post-1998 constitutional arrangements together. The fate of Northern Ireland is indissolubly connected with those of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, which is why the change in Britain's constitutional arrangements caused by our departure from the EU is potentially so fateful.That may seem to be a truism ; but it is a truism that appears to be increasingly forgotten. For many amnesiac politicians, Northern Ireland is part of the past, a terrible past, when, in Reginald Maudling's notorious description (in 1970) it was 'a bloody awful country.' It was, in part, the British state's belated recognition that it had a large share of the responsibility for the 'bloody awful' state of Northern Ireland that was one of the first of many steps to tentative reconciliation. It is also a truism that only a political ethic of mutual responsibility and compromise, and willingness to understand the other person's perspective, can hold the constituent parts of the United Kingdom together. But that truism, apparently obvious though it is, is also increasingly overlooked. The current meretricious and mendacious guff about 'Global Britain' and 'national sovereignty' does nothing to clarify the problem.
Not for nothing was John Hume passionately pro-European. And not for nothing did most of the inhabitants of Northern Ireland (Unionists included) vote Remain. We may revere Mr. Hume in death, as we honoured him in life. But we should not ignore that he had much to impart ; and we have much to learn from his example.