Ajeeb said that no culture could remain static, neither British nor Pakistani. And while groups liked to cling to the old ways and there would be conflict, eventually different groups would intermingle. For him the important thing was that minorities secure political power for themselves. At the same time, he said that, although he wanted to become a Parliamentary candidate, no one would offer him a constituency where he could stand. This was, he thought, because he was Asian and the Labour Party feared that the white working class wouldn’t vote for him. He could stand as Parliamentary candidate only in a black area, which seemed fine to him for the time being; he was prepared to do that.
There were others who weren’t prepared to put up with the racism in the trade union movement and in the Labour Party itself in the way Ajeeb had. I met a middle-aged Indian man, a tax inspector, who had been in the Labour Party for at least ten years. He had offered to help canvass during the local council elections — on a white council estate. He was told that it wouldn’t be to the party’s advantage for him to help in a white area. He was so offended that he offered his services to the Tories. Although he hated Margaret Thatcher, he found the Tories welcomed him. He started to lecture on the subject of Asians in Britain to various Tory groups and Rotary Club dinners, until he found himself talking at the Wakefield Police College. At the Wakefield Police College he encountered the worst racists he had ever seen in his life.
He did not need to go into details. Only a few months before, at an anti-apartheid demonstration outside South Africa House in London, I’d been standing by a police line when a policeman started to talk to me. He spoke in a low voice, as if he were telling me about the traffic in Piccadilly. ‘You bastards,’ he said. ‘We hate you, we don’t want you here. Everything would be all right, there’d be none of this, if you pissed off home.’ And he went on like that, fixing me with a stare. ‘You wogs, you coons, you blacks, we hate you all.’
Ajeeb said that if there was anything he clung to when things became unbearable, it was the knowledge that the British electorate always rejected the far right. They had never voted in significant numbers for neo-fascist groups like the National Front and the British National Party. Even the so-called New Right, a prominent and noisy group of journalists, lecturers and intellectuals, had no great popular following. People knew what viciousness underlay their ideas, he said.
Some of the views of the New Right, Ajeeb believed, had much in common with proletarian far-right organisations like the National Front: its members held to the notion of white racial superiority, they believed in repatriation and they argued that the mixing of cultures would lead to the degeneration of British culture. Ajeeb argued that they used the rhetoric of ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ and ‘nationhood’ as a fig-leaf; in the end they wished to defend a mythical idea of white culture. Honeyford was associated with the New Right, and what he and people like him wanted, Ajeeb said, was for Asians to behave exactly like the whites. And if they didn’t do this, they should leave.
This movement known as the New Right is grouped around the Conservative Philosophy Group and the Salisbury Review, the magazine that published Honeyford’s article. The group is a loose affiliation of individuals with similar views. A number of them are graduates of Peterhouse, Cambridge. These include John Vincent, Professor of History at Bristol University, who writes a weekly column for the Sun; Colin Welch, a columnist for the Spectator.
Like a lot of people in Bradford, Ajeeb became agitated on the subject of the New Right and Honeyford’s relationship with it. But how important was it? What did the views of a few extremists really matter? So what if they wrote for influential papers? At least they weren’t on the street wearing boots. But the ideas expressed by Honeyford had split Bradford apart. These ideas were alive and active in the city, entering into arguments about education, housing, citizenship, health, food and politics. Bradford was a city in which ideas carried knives.
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Ray Honeyford went to Bradford’s Drummond Middle School as Headmaster in January 1980. The children were aged between nine and thirteen. At the time the school was 50 per cent Asian. When he left last spring it was 95 per cent.
Honeyford is from a working-class background. He failed his exams for grammar school, and from the age of fifteen worked for ten years for a company that makes desiccated coconut. In his late twenties, he attended a two-year teacher-training course at Didsbury College, and later got further degrees from the universities of Lancaster and Manchester. He described himself as a Marxist, and was a member of the Labour Party. But all that changed when he began teaching at a mixed-race school. He submitted an unsolicited article to the Salisbury Review, and the article, entitled ‘Education and Race — An Alternative View’, was accepted.
The article is a polemic. It argues that the multi-racial policies endorsed by various members of the teaching establishment are damaging the English way of life, and that proper English people should resist these assaults on the ‘British traditions of understatement, civilised discourse and respect for reason’. It wasn’t too surprising that a polemic of this sort written by the headmaster of a school made up almost entirely of Asian children was seen to be controversial.
But the real problem wasn’t the polemic but the rhetorical asides and parentheticals. Honeyford mentions the ‘hysterical political temperament of the Indian subcontinent’, and describes Asians as ‘these people’ (in an earlier article, they are ‘settler children’). A Sikh is ‘half-educated and volatile’, and black intellectuals are ‘aggressive’. Honeyford then goes on to attack Pakistan itself, which in a curious non-sequitur seems to be responsible for British drug problems:
Pakistan is a country which cannot cope with democracy; under martial law since 1977, it is ruled by a military tyrant who, in the opinion of at least half his countrymen, had his predecessor judicially murdered. A country, moreover, which despite disproportionate western aid because of its important strategic position, remains for most of its people obstinately backward. Corruption at every level combines with unspeakable treatment not only of criminals, but of those who dare to question Islamic orthodoxy as interpreted by a despot. Even as I write, wounded dissidents are chained to hospital beds awaiting their fate. Pakistan, too, is the heroin capital of the world. (A fact which is now reflected in the drug problems of English cities with Asian populations.)
It is perhaps not unreasonable that some people felt the article was expressing more than merely an alternative view on matters of education.
Honeyford wrote a second piece for the Salisbury Review, equally ‘tolerant’, ‘reasonable’ and ‘civilised’, but this one was noticed by someone in Bradford’s education department, and then the trouble started — the protests, the boycott, the enormous publicity. A little research revealed that Honeyford’s asides were a feature of most of his freelance journalism, his most noteworthy being his reference in the Times Educational Supplement to an Asian parent who visited him wanting to talk about his child’s education: his accent, it seems, was ‘like that of Peter Sellers’s Indian doctor on an off day’.
The difficulty about the ‘Honeyford Affair’ was that it did not involve only Honeyford. His views are related to the much larger issue of what it is to be British, and what Britain should be in the future. And these views are, again, most clearly stated by the New Right, with which Honeyford closely identified himself. ‘He is’, Honeyford said of Roger Scruton, the high Tory editor of the Salisbury Review, ‘the most brilliant man I have ever met.’