Ray Honeyford vindicated

In the light of Ruth Kelly's recent speech questioning the value of multi-culturalism (see 24 August, below) the Sunday Telegraph looks in depth at how things things have changed since the Ray Honeyford controversy.

Ray Honeyford, 72, "retired" more than 20 years ago as the headmaster of a school in Bradford. Or, at least, that was when he was vilified by politically correct race "experts", was sent death threats, and condemned as a racist. Eventually, he was forced to resign and never allowed to teach again. 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 in such practices as the withdrawal of children from school for months at a time in order to go ''home" to Pakistan, on the grounds that such practices were appropriate to the children's native culture.

20 years ago I was teaching in a Bradford secondary school, so I saw at first hand the twisted hate with which the extremist left regarded Honeyford. It has taken two decades and the rise of domestic Islamic terrorism to change the thinking of the remote government elite. Now Honeyford's views are entering government discourse when it is too late for this brave man to benefit.