Ethno-Nationalist Activist Found Guilty of Inciting Racial Hatred With Stickers

Undated photo showing Lady Justice statue on top of the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales in central London. Clara Molden/PA

An ethno-nationalist activist has been found guilty of running an online library of downloadable stickers meant to “stir up racial hatred.”

On Wednesday, a jury in Leeds convicted Samuel Melia, 34, who is the Yorkshire organiser for the ethno-nationalist group Patriotic Alternative, of distributing downloadable versions of stickers which were “intended to stir up racial hatred” and encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage.

The stickers bore slogans such as “Labour loves Muslim rape gangs,” “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066,” “Mass immigration is white genocide” and “Second-generation? Third? Fourth? You have to go back,“ warning non-white people “that they were being targeted.”

Hundred Handers

Mr. Melia described himself as “pro-British or a white advocate.” He was also the head of the Hundred Handers, a group that coordinated to put up anti-immigration stickers in different areas between 2019 and 2021, the court heard.

He was arrested outside a post office in Leeds in April 2021 on suspicion of publishing or distributing material which may stir up racial hatred.

When police searched his house in Pudsey, West Yorkshire, they found a label printer and stickers with slogans such as “it’s ok to be white” and “natives losing jobs; migrants pouring in.”

Opening the case to jurors last week, prosecutor Tom Storey, KC, said the stickers were used to “warn or intimidate members of non-Christian religions, or those from non-white races, that they were being targeted.”

Mr. Storey said the Hundred Handers Telegram channel had over 3,500 subscribers and that a number of photographs had been posted to it of stickers in public locations such as lampposts, vending machines, public toilets, train stations and the door of an MP’s constituency office.

Mr. Storey said, “Also found within the defendant’s Telegram posts and chat were messages which make clear that he expected that Hundred Handers stickers would be displayed in public places, and also that he had placed stickers in such places himself.”

He added that Mr. Melia had wanted to “plaster the surrounding area” the night before a Black Lives Matter protest was taking place in Leeds.

Mr. Melia told the court the stickers were intended to be put on street furniture such as lamp posts, benches, bus stops and “places people are waiting.”

“You go round Leeds, and there’s stickers on everything. There must be a reason people are putting them out there,” he said.

Judge Tom Bayliss, KC, bailed the defendant until his sentencing at the same court on March 1.

Patriotic Alternative

According to its site, Patriotic Alternative campaigns against “the demographic decline of native Britons in the United Kingdom.”

Some of its policies include a government commission to “identify and overturn all policy that discriminates against the indigenous people” as well as a “complete halt to all immigration unless under exceptional circumstances.”

It also only wants the UK to take refugees who descend “from European nations or from other parts of the world who have a shared ethnic and cultural background or who can prove British ancestry,” though a notable example is made for white South Africans.

Patriotic Alternative wants no “immigrant-descended person ever to be allowed to make decisions regarding the ethnic composition of the UK” and to offer financial incentives to people of immigrant descent who have obtained British passports to return to their ancestral homelands.

PA Media contributed to this report.