In 1984, writing in the conservative journal the Salisbury Review, Ray Honeyford challenged the notion that “multiracial inner cities are not only inevitable but, in some sense, desirable” and had “real educational consequences”. Honeyford, the headmaster of Drummond Middle School, Bradford, had two years’ previously written to his local paper complaining about the opening of a nearby black community centre. In the course of his essay “Education and race – an alternative view”, which was widely read and led to his suspension and then ultimately to his early retirement, Honeyford argued that the children of “indigenous parents” were failed by racially mixed schooling, adding for good measure that people arriving from Pakistan were from a country that was “obstinately backward”, and that “educational ambition” was absent from the “vast majority of West Indian homes”.
Believing Thatcher-era Britain to have created a climate where the “race relations lobby” was all-powerful and the police were blamed for “the behaviour of violent thugs”, Honeyford was most incensed that “creole, pidgin and other non-standard variants” were being held up against standard English in terms of power, subtlety and capacity for irony. By way of example, he decried the “misguided” efforts of fellow educators to place “Inglan is a Bitch” by Linton Kwesi Johnson (the Jamaican-born poet dubbed the “Bard of Brixton”) alongside Shakespeare and Wordsworth in the curriculum.
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