British right-wing activist Sam Melia has been jailed for two years for sharing anti-immigration stickers with slogans including “it’s okay to be White” and “love your nation”.
Melia, a 34-year-old father from Pudsey, was sentenced to two years in prison at Leeds Crown Court on Friday, after being found guilty inciting racial hatred and encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage earlier this year.
He will serve at least one year in custody after being sentenced to two years’ jail for each charge, to run concurrently, and will then be released on licence.
Judge Tom Bayliss KC said: “The publication of this kind of material is corrosive to our society.”
“For the first time since the 1930s, a real risk of gross, potentially violent, antisemitism is becoming normalised on our streets. It has been used before to tear at the heart of Western democracy. It must not be allowed to do so again.”
In 2017 Judge Bayliss gave a paedophile a suspended eight-month sentence for possessing child sex abuse material, and in 2022 gave the same sentence to another paedophile, Bilal Akalwaya, 51, who admitted to have sex with a friend’s dog and possessing hundreds of images of children as young as three being sexually abused.
Melia, an organiser for nationalist group Patriotic Alternative, was arrested in April 2021 for running an online collection of downloadable stickers for an activist group called “Hundred Handers”.
He told the court during his trial that the stickers, which were put up by activists across the UK and abroad, were intended to start conversations.
“Today PA Yorkshire Regional Organiser, Sam Melia, will be spending his first gloomy night behind bars in a prison run by the British State,” Patriotic Alternative said in a statement after Melia’s sentencing.
“His ‘crime’? Designing stickers to raise awareness about the failure of multi-culturalism and the grim demographic replacement of the native peoples by the hordes from the Third World, whose arrival and efforts to colonise our homeland are deliberately facilitated by the very same British State.”
The group’s leader and founder, Mark Collett, said: “Sam Melia is a hero. He might be laying alone in a jail cell tonight, but he’s in the hearts and on the minds of thousands of people who are all outraged by what the anti-White system have done to him.
“Sam isn’t a criminal, he is a political prisoner and martyr.”
Detective Chief Superintendent James Dunkerley, Head of Counter Terrorism Policing North East, said after Melia’s sentencing: “Evidence shows that large numbers of these stickers appeared both here in the UK and a number abroad.
“These expressions of hate were an attempt to bring upset and stir up racial hatred. It is important to highlight however that our communities are strong and will not allow those who seek to disrupt them succeed.
“Those that seek to bring hatred to our communities through actions such as stickering will be identified and brought to justice.”
Melia’s pregnant wife, Patriotic Alternative deputy leader Laura Towler, said that the judge could have suspended Melia’s sentence but refused to despite a report from his probation officer saying he posed no risk to the public and there was no chance of him reoffending.
“If you take anything from this, let it remind you why we do what we do. We live in a country where our people are attacked by the anti-White state for advocating for their own safety and interests,” she said in a statement after the sentencing.
Free Speech Union founder Toby Young said: “Sam Melia’s conviction points to the shortcomings of the ‘stirring up’ clauses in the Public Order Act.
“Why is he guilty of ‘stirring up’ racial or religious hatred, but not George Galloway, some of whose comments about Israel and Zionism have been equally incendiary? Yet Galloway is now the MP for Rochdale, while Melia has gone to prison for two years.
“Either the law is applied consistently, without fear or favour, or it’s not fit for purpose.
“It cannot be one law for right-wing white working class men and another for left-wing politicians.”
Galloway, a controversial left-wing activist and former MP who has been accused of anti-Semitism, won almost 40% of the vote in the seat of Rochdale, which has a large Muslim minority, in a by-election on Thursday.
Spiked Online deputy editor told GB News: “You do not have to agree with a single thing Sam Melia believes to find his two-year sentence utterly chilling. Many violent criminals have been punished with far less ferocity than Melia has been for the ‘crime’ of producing some stickers.”
