Salisbury Review

The "Salisbury Review" is a British conservative magazine, published quarterly and founded in 1982. Roger Scruton was its chief editor for eighteen years and published it through his Claridge Press. It was named after Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, the British Prime Minister at the end of the nineteenth century. From 2000 the editor was the historian A. D. Harvey. As of 2006 managing editor is Merrie Cave.

Contributors have included Antony Flew, Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher, Václav Havel, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Norman Stone, Michael J. Rutherford and Stuart Millson.

Founding the magazine

The publication was founded in 1982 by the Salisbury Group of Tories, who chose Scruton for his defence of traditional conservatism against proponents of the free market in "The Meaning of Conservatism" (1980). The Salisbury group itself was set up in 1976 to support the view of the Third Marquess of Salisbury that "good government consisted of doing as little as possible".

In "The Spectator" of 21 September 2002 Scruton wrote an article, "My Life Beyond the Pale", in which he explained what he saw as the difficulties "of finding people to write in an explicitly conservative journal". He noted that finding subscribers was initially difficult, and that Maurice Cowling had told him that to "try to encapsulate [conservatism] in a philosophy was the kind of quaint project that Americans might undertake". He also wrote that the editorship

:"had cost me many thousand hours of unpaid labour, a hideous character assassination in "Private Eye", three lawsuits, two interrogations, one expulsion, the loss of a university career in Britain, unendingly contemptuous reviews, Tory suspicion, and the hatred of decent liberals everywhere. And it was worth it."

The Honeyford affair

A controversy involving Ray Honeyford, head of a school in Bradford, Yorkshire, gave the Salisbury Review much publicity in 1984. According to Scruton:

:This episode was our first great success, and led to the 600 subscriptions that we needed.

An article written by Honeyford for the Review in 1984 discussed themes on ethnicity, culture and assimilation, and educational performance. He had already made public his views in two letters in 1982, to the "Times Educational Supplement" (TES) and a local Bradford paper, and then in an extended article in the TES in November 1982. In that, he rehearsed a number of points, in particular on where the onus for integration and the limiting factors for educational performance lie in the home family environment in immigrant families. He attacked what he saw as the misplaced use of multiculturalism in schools, and 'political correctness' in the form of scrutiny of textbook material.

The 1984 Salisbury Review article "Education and Race — an Alternative View" (see external link) covered similar ground, but caused a national outcry. Honeyford had already been in discussion with his Local Education Authority after the 1982 TES article, in the context of Bradford Council guidelines on educational aims issued in that year, but had not been disciplined. After the second article he was disciplined, and was also the target of a campaign for his dismissal. He was sacked, reinstated and then took early retirement, about two years after the Salisbury Review article was published. As of 2005 Honeyford continues to write about education, ethnic group performance and IQ.

References

*"Education, Justice and Cultural Diversity: an Examination of the Honeyford Affair, 1984-85" (1988) Mark Halstead

External links

* [http://www.salisburyreview.co.uk/ Official website]
* [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/08/27/ftmulti27.xml Education and Race - an Alternative View]
* [http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/docs/Halstead2.html Page on the Honeyford affair]