An ethno-nationalist activist found guilty of running an online library of downloadable stickers allegedly intended to “stir up racial hatred” has been jailed for two years.
In January, a jury in Leeds convicted Samuel Melia, 34, who is the Yorkshire organiser for the ethno-nationalist group Patriotic Alternative, of distributing the downloadable stickers and encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage.
Hundred Handers
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.”Melia described himself as “pro-British or a white advocate.” He was also the head of the Hundred Handers, a group that coordinated putting 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.
On Friday, Judge Bayliss told Melia: “I am quite sure that your mindset is that of a racist and a white supremacist.
“You hold Nazi sympathies and you are an anti-Semite.”
He told Melia: “Whilst your activity ceased in 2021, recent events in the United Kingdom demonstrate that there is, for the first time since the 1930s, a real risk of gross, potentially violent, anti-Semitism becoming normalised on our streets.
“The publication of this kind of material is corrosive to our society and highly damaging.
Stickers
During his trial, prosecutor Tom Storey, KC, 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 Melia had wanted to “plaster the surrounding area” the night before a Black Lives Matter protest was taking place in Leeds.
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.
Patriotic Alternative
According to its website, 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 exception 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.
