Third Way (UK)

Third Way is a far-right think tank and political party. Its founder was former National Front member Patrick Harrington.

Background

In 2006, Andrew Gilligan reported:

In east London, Essex and Hertfordshire, on London's fringes, there is a party called Third Way. Nothing to do with Tony Blair, Third Way attends community meetings, supports neighbourhood forums, and has taken a highly popular campaigning stand on issues such as saving small local shops. At the last elections in the London borough of Havering, four years ago, Third Way's leading light, a man called Graham Williamson, won more than 1,300 votes in his home ward of Elm Park, a third of those voting and within striking distance of winning a seat.

In next month's Havering elections, Third Way will be fielding 14 candidates under its own name - plus a further 25 as part of the "People's Alliance", a coalition of local residents' groups and independents, including a councillor. "We [the People's Alliance] are standing in 17 out of the 18 wards in the borough," Mr Williamson told the Standard. "We will win seats and we will be a significant force on the council, perhaps hold the balance of power."

CERTAINLY the Third Way and People's Alliance manifesto has unexceptionable policies on stopping new housing developments, lower council tax rises and helping pensioners. Its candidates wear decent suits and work in professional jobs. They look like ordinary politicians. They make coalitions with the kind of groups that ordinary people support. But what the would-be voters of Third Way - and its partners in the People's Alliance - may not know is that Mr Williamson is the former chairman of the National Front. The Standard today publishes a picture of him on an NF march with his then close friend, one Nick Griffin.

Mr Williamson enjoyed a long and exotic career in the Front, previously Britain's main racist party, joining a faction known at the "Political Soldiers", which came heavily under the influence of a convicted Italian terrorist and revolutionary, Roberto Fiore. At least one other Third Way candidate in Havering, David Durant, is also a former NF activist - and Companies House records reveal that Third Way's secretary is Patrick Harrington, the National Front organiser whose attendance at the then North London Polytechnic caused a furore in the 1980s. Mr Williamson told the Standard that the NF was 15 years in his past, and he, Mr Harrington and Third Way now disavow racism. "We left the NF because it was racist," he says. "We call ourselves a patriotic liberal party. We believe in liberty, but we also believe in national identity."

One of the Third Way candidates in Havering is Sri Lankan, although it's not clear whether he knows about his leader's history. "I have a past," says Mr Williamson. "I don't think it was a bad past. What I reject is the image that the NF had." And the BNP? "We discussed the BNP. We couldn't go with the BNP because there's too much stigma, too much baggage," he says. Yet Third Way's protestations of respectability start to fall a little flat when you look at its website, with its contributions from Mr Griffin, protesting that the BNP is the "oppressed opposition", and from Mr Williamson himself, describing Britain's "fragile multiethnic state" and lamenting that "racial nationalism has become the paedophilia of the political world".

With its call for direct democracy by referendum, a "Swiss-style responsibly armed nation", and a return of civil national service, Third Way's national manifesto turns out to bear a striking resemblance to the BNP's, minus the overtly racist elements. And, equally strikingly, the BNP is not standing against Third Way in any seat in Havering, though Mr Williamson denies that he has done any deals. "They do tend to play the racist card," says Graham Carr, a Labour councillor in Mr Williamson's Elm Park ward. "I chair the neighbourhood committee. They turn up and every question they ask is generally to do with race - 'Is it true Havering has a low rate support grant because we have a low ethnic minority population?' - that sort of thing." Ray Harris, leader of the Labour group in Havering and also an Elm Park councillor, says Third Way has been "stirring up campaigns around the alleged expansion of the ethnic minority population", telling local people that new developments to be built in the borough will be given to asylum seekers and Bengalis from Tower Hamlets. "They're insidious, frightening in a sense," he says.

BOTH men think that Third Way is less of a threat than Williamson would like, but they know there is a market for the kind of politics he represents, a market among middleclass homeowners who would run a mile if confronted with the criminals and loonies of the BNP. Nor is this market confined to the traditionally Rightwing suburbs of east London and Essex. Third Way is linked, through a body known as the English Lobby, to another group called the Freedom Party, which has a growing branch, or rather "unit", in the leafier territory of Kent.

The Freedom Party, says its website, aims to "represent the core values of most of our people", but "is not, like many such organisations, an embarrassment to be associated with". The site - which talks about its alliance with the English Lobby, of which Williamson was a director until January - is full of emotive stories about race. One concerns the asylum seeker who defaced a war memorial, another, the Scouts who were too white to get a council grant. The site condemns what it calls "unlimited invasion by immigrants". And, yes, the party's "tactical doctrine" is to "champion local campaigns against 'politically correct' tyrannies ... identifying local issues that can be used to harness local public support for the party".

As with Third Way, several roads lead back to the BNP. The Freedom Party's leadership includes Adrian Davies, a barrister who informally advised Mr Griffin during his court case for incitement to racial hatred, as well as Sharron and Steve Edwards, who walked out of the BNP after Mr Griffin paid for an extension at his home using party funds, and a former BNP press officer, Mike Newland. But the most interesting thing about the English Lobby and the Freedom Party is their links with the Tories. Mr Davies spoke at a Tory conference fringe meeting in 2004, and the company secretary of the English Lobby, Richard Long, is a Tory councillor in Kent. (Mr Long, a solicitor, told the Standard that he was acting in his professional capacity and had no connection to Mr Williamson, Third Way or any far-Right group.) In multiracial Hounslow, an organisation called the Isleworth Community Group has three councillors standing for re-election, among them its founder Phil Andrews, a former NF parliamentary candidate and Holocaust denier who served six months' imprisonment in 1986 for causing actual bodily harm to a black police officer at a St George's Day rally.

In an article for the fascist publication Nationalism Today, Mr Andrews described in detail his plans for infiltrating tenants' and community groups. He says he has now renounced his racist views and there is no suggestion that Isleworth Community Group is a racist organisation. However, in 2003 Mr Andrews lost a court action for malicious falsehood which he brought against four Labour Party activists for a leaflet saying ethnic minority residents would be at risk if he was elected.