Let’s face it – Ray Honeyford got it right on Islam and education

Thirty years ago, as editor of the Salisbury Review, I began to receive short articles from a Bradford headmaster, relating the dilemmas faced by those attempting to provide an English education to the children of Asian immigrants. Ray Honeyford’s case was simple. Children born and raised in Britain must be integrated into British society. Schools and teachers therefore had a duty, not merely to impart the English language and the English curriculum, but to ensure that children understood and adhered to the basic principles of the surrounding society, including racial and religious tolerance, sexual equality and the habit of settling conflicts by compromise and not by force.

Honeyford complained of the damage done by the multicultural ‘experts’, whose sole aim seemed to be ghettoisation. He recounted his efforts to explain to parents that it was in fact against the law to take their children out of school for weeks on end during term time.