REALISM'S REWARD

The left often prefers to see things as they want them to be, not as they are:

As the head of Drummond Middle School in Bradford, where 90 per cent of pupils were Asian, Mr Honeyford was concerned about the consequences of encouraging children to cling to their own ethnic group rather than integrate.

In a series of articles published in the Right-wing Salisbury Review in the early 1980s, he criticised Bradford city council's policy of educating ethnic minority children according to their own culture, predicting that the move would create divisions between white and Asian communities.

At school, where languages such as Urdu, Gujurati and Hindi predominated over English, Mr Honeyford tried to introduce a uniform but he was opposed by the local council, which judged that such a move could be racist. Concerned that "we were getting nine-year-olds who had never sat in the same class as a white child", Mr Honeyford wanted to impose racial integration - if need be, by busing in white pupils from across the city.

His views provoked an outcry among the anti-racism lobby. Some picketed the school and Mr Honeyford was subjected to personal abuse and accused of racial prejudice - leading to his early retirement in December 1985 to save his family from further harassment. He wrote later that he was told he had been forced out because his attitudes were "racist" and his insistence on integrating Asian children was "dangerous and damaging".

Alternatively, multiculturalism can be deadly.

Via: Clear and Present