In the early 1980s, when he was headmaster of Drummond Middle School in Bradford, Yorkshire, he wrote an article critical of multiculturalism and its effect on British education: this was published in January 1984, in The Salisbury Review, a conservative magazine edited by the philosopher Roger Scruton.
He attacked what he saw as the misplaced use of multiculturalism in schools, including the failure to teach children English from a young age: "Those of us working in Asian areas are encouraged, officially, to 'celebrate linguistic diversity', i.e. applaud the rapidly mounting linguistic confusion in those growing number of inner-city schools in which British-born Asian children begin their mastery of English by being taught in Urdu.
[6] He also attacked "political correctness" and the "race relations lobby" for employing "a dubious, officially approved argot which functions to maintain a whole set of questionable beliefs and attitudes about education and race – attitudes which have much more to do with professional opportunism than the educational progress of ethnic minority children".
[4] He then became the target of a campaign by an action group involving a number of parents;[4] sections of Honeyford's writings were translated into Urdu,[7] and protests were held outside his school.
[4] Honeyford had to be given police protection, and in December he finally took early retirement, about two years after The Salisbury Review article was published.
[8][9] The journalist and author Robert Winder said that Honeyford made "a serious point" when he argued that the kind of multiculturalism "which encouraged [pupils] to work within their own cultures and languages...was cumbersome, inefficient and divisive".
[3] In his autobiography, Scruton wrote, "Ray Honeyford was branded as a racist, horribly pilloried, and eventually sacked, for saying what everyone now admits to be true".