RIP Ray Honeyford

So RIP Ray Honeyford, the former headmaster of the Drummond Middle School in Bradford. He died on February 5; he had not worked in teaching since the anti-racccccccccisst left forced him out of his job in the middle of the 1980s.

His crime was to have insisted that the Asian kids in the school receive exactly the same teaching as the white kids. That meant such controversial stuff as swimming lessons for the Muslim girls. He wrote a couple of articles expressing this point of view and was sacked by an alliance of the Tory government and the local Labour council.

He was not, of course, remotely a racist. And yet at the time he was designated as such by almost the entire country. To have offered words in his support was to make you racist too.

I met him, a few years ago, at his neat little house in Bury. A clever, sad man who was still perplexed at the treatment he received. At least he outlived the creed of multiculturalism, the thing that did for his career. But he never received an apology, was never thanked for either his contribution to teaching or his principles.