What goes around, comes around, they say.
In an ever-so-slightly too late effort to ease racial and religious tension the government's Communities Secretary, Ruth Kelly, has launched the 14-member Commission for Integration and Cohesion. And if you think that the title has a ring of Orwellian doublespeak about it, just bear in mind that we already have a Department of Health to preside over our bankrupt hospitals and an explosion of fat that will see one person in three being officially obese by 2010, and a Department of Education and Skills that supervises our failing schools and such a massive skills shortage that we need to welcome thousands of young workers from Poland (and I do mean that - we really do need them and we really should welcome them). And then there's the Home Office …
Introducing the new commission Ruth Kelly signalled the official end of multiculturalism. She called for a "new and honest debate that "must not be censored by political correctness". She suggested that multiculturalism may have led to isolated communities with no common bonds, saying "We have moved from a period of uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism to one where we can encourage that debate by questioning whether it is encouraging separateness."
She is reported to have had "sharp" exchanges with some community leaders in a series of recent meetings, telling them they have got to do more to integrate into mainstream society.
"In our attempt to avoid imposing a single British identity and culture, have we ended up with some communities living in isolation of each other, with no common bonds between them?" she asked, and warned that there could be no "special treatment" for minority ethnic or faith communities as it simply bred resentment and exacerbated divisions.
More than 20 years ago Ray Honeyford was headmaster of Drummond Middle School in Bradford. In 1984 he had an article published in the conservative philosophical magazine "The Salisbury Review" doubting whether the children in his school were best served by the connivance of the educational authorities in such practices as the withdrawal of children from school for months at a time in order to go ''home" to Pakistan, on the grounds that such practices were appropriate to the children's native culture. He drew attention, at a time when it was still politically incorrect to do so, to the dangers of ghettoes developing in British cities.
He thought that schools such as his own, where 95 per cent of the children were of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, were a disaster both for their pupils and for society as a whole. He was a passionate believer in the redemptive power of education, and its ability to integrate people of different backgrounds and weld them into a common society. He became notorious for, among other things, insisting that Muslim girls should be educated to the same standard as everyone else and in the same subjects - even if that meant they had to take their trousers off for swimming.
For this he was vilified by the racial equality lobby, received death threats, and was condemned as a racist. Eventually, he was forced to resign and never allowed to teach again.
After the London tube bombings and the recent alleged airline plot, Honeyford's warning that the failure to give British minorities a normal British education would result in disaster is looking not too wide of the mark.
Now 71 and suffering from Parkinson's disease, he lives quietly in Lancashire. Drummond Middle School has been renamed Iqra School.
The GOS says: This page assumes that we are all clear about the meaning of "multiculturalism". For the record, it means encouraging people of different origins to maintain their own communities, languages and customs independent of the society around them, rather than joining that society. Multiculturalism, or opposition to it, has nothing to do with immigration or racial prejudice. Not in my head, anyway …
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