In January 1984 the headmaster of a school in Bradford, Ray Honeyford, published a piece in a small-circulation magazine called The Salisbury Review, in which he reflected on some aspects of running a school in an area where 90 per cent of pupils were of immigrant parents. He mentioned the refusal of some Muslim fathers to permit their daughters to participate in dance classes, drama or sport, and the silence of the authorities on this and other cultural practices, such as taking children back to Pakistan during term time. He also argued for pupils to be encouraged to speak the language and understand the culture of the country they were living in and not to be encouraged to live – as Honeyford argued the race-relations leadership were trying to encourage them to do – parallel lives within society.

A campaign against Honeyford was swiftly organised by the race-relations industry he had used part of his article to criticise. The Muslim Mayor of Bradford demanded Honeyford be sacked, accusing him even years later of (among other things) ‘cultural chauvinism’.¹² Amid protests and nationwide cries of ‘Raycist’, Honeyford was forced out of his job and never again worked in education. He had said in his offending article that thanks to a corruption of politics and even of language it was difficult to write honestly about these matters, and his own treatment more than proved that point. Why should a popular headmaster – about whom there were no other complaints – have been forced into retirement for making such an argument? The only explanation is that at the time even plain truths about these matters had not yet become palatable. A political and social paradigm – uncomfortably referred to as ‘multiculturalism’ – had begun, and in 1984 it was not yet possible to shatter the basis of that belief. Although it would have been scant consolation to Ray Honeyford, within a couple of decades of his article’s publication many more people were saying that perhaps he had been onto something, and by the time of his death in 2012 the thrust of his argument had become widely accepted.

During the 1980s and 1990s, under the new rubric of ‘multiculturalism’, a steady stream of immigration into Britain continued from the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere. But an unspoken consensus existed whereby immigration – while always trending upwards – was quietly limited. What happened then, after the Labour Party’s landslide election victory in 1997, was a breaking of that consensus. Although neither a manifesto commitment nor a stated aim, once in power Tony Blair’s government oversaw an opening of the borders on a scale unparalleled even in the post-war decades. They abolished the ‘primary purpose rule’, which had attempted to filter out bogus marriage applications. They opened the borders to anyone deemed essential to the British economy – a definition so broad that it included restaurant workers as ‘skilled labourers’. And as well as opening the door to the rest of the world, they opened the borders to the new EU member states of Eastern Europe. It was the effects of all of this, and more, that created the picture of the country revealed in the 2011 census.