A pro-British activist has been convicted of inciting racial hatred for sharing stickers with slogans such as “it’s okay to be White”, “love your nation”, and “White lives matter”.
Sam Melia, 34, was on Wednesday at Leeds Crown Court found guilty of intending to stir up racial hatred through the distribution of the stickers and encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage.
Melia, an organiser for nationalist group Patriotic Alternative, was arrested in April 2021. Police found stickers in his wallet with the logo of a Telegram group called the Hundred Handers, and slogans such as “Britons Build Britain” and “Equality or Quality – you can only have one”, BBC News reported.
During his trial the court heard police searched Melia’s home in northern England and found other stickers saying “it’s okay to be White” and “natives losing jobs; migrants pouring in”.
The prosecution claimed the group shared more “extreme” stickers with slogans including “Second-generation? Third? Fourth? You have to go back”, “mass immigration is White genocide”, “they seek conquest not asylum” and “there is a war on Whites”, and photos of the stickers in public locations.
Melia told the court he did not intend to stir up racial hatred, and published the stickers to encourage debate, Leeds Live reported.
“The idea was always conversations about topics. They are topics like the grooming gangs or rape gangs that have been prevalent across this country. The idea of the messages is to start a conversation, not to make someone feel intimidated,” he told jurors.
Melia also denied hating people of different races.
“Everyone deserves their own homeland and I wish them well in that homeland,” he told the court.
The prosecution claimed a book by Oswald Mosley, a poster of Adolf Hitler and a Nazi emblem also found in Melia’s home during the police raid were “key signs of his ideology and underpinned his desire to spread his racist views in a deliberate manner”.
Prosecutor Tom Storey KC also told the court Melia’s attempts to stay anonymous in the Telegram group was an attempt to protect himself from potential investigation.
Judge Tom Bayliss KC told Melia he would be sentenced on March 1, and warned him if he commented on the trial on social media “it wouldn’t go well for you”.
Melia’s wife, Patriotic Alternative deputy leader Laura Towler, wrote on Telegram that she would also refrain from commenting about the case or the trial so as not to influence the sentence, except to say she was proud of her husband.
“He put his head above the parapet, defended his people and told the truth,” she wrote.
