Ray Honeyford questioned multiculturalism and lost his job.
His crime was to publish an article in The Salisbury Review in 1984 doubting whether the children in his school were best served by the connivance of the educational authorities.
That was twenty years ago. Recently some of his views have become more fashionable.
Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, made a speech, publicly questioning the multiculturalist orthodoxies that, for so long, have acted almost as a test of virtue among “right-thinking” people….In our attempt to avoid imposing a single British identity and culture, have we ended up with some communities living in isolation of each other, with no common bonds between them?”
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Her speech comes about a year after that of Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, who wondered whether the nostrums of multiculturalism had done more harm than good, and suggested instead that immigrants and children of immigrants needed to be given some means of becoming British. The constant emphasis on the worst possible interpretation of British history would, in the end, lead to a society not merely of separate communities, but of antipathetical ghettoes.
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Around the same time, the man who was then mayor of Bradford, Mohammed Ajeeb, is adamant that he did the right thing in calling for Mr Honeyford’s dismissal. Mr Ajeeb recently said: “I had no doubt in my mind that the man was a racist and I insisted he must go.”… Mr Ajeeb’s own views of the means by which education might serve to integrate people have changed in the past 20 years. Previously, he was against the idea of dispersing Muslim children throughout other schools (bussing, in effect, such as had been done in the United States), which is now his preferred solution, so that no school in Bradford’s inner city should have more than 70 per cent of any one race.
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Mr Ajeeb received death threats at the time of the Honeyford affair. So did Mr Honeyford, who had to live for a time under police protection. His school was constantly picketed by activists, and eventually burnt down in an arson attack. The situation was explosive, though, even to this day, interpretations vary as to who was to blame.
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Mr Honeyford’s school has been rebuilt at great expense. It is still predominantly Muslim, with a 15 per cent Somalian intake; in an act of what some view as outstanding multicultural political correctness, it has been renamed Iqra, though it is still known locally as the Drummond.
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The fact that he published his article in The Salisbury Review, seen as so Right-wing as to be completely off the scale of respectability, was part of the problem; if he had published it in an equivalently Left-wing journal, it would have been very much less objectionable.
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