Free speech concerns have been raised after a Leeds man was sentenced to two years in prison after being found guilty of stirring up racial hatred through the publication and distribution of “racist” and “anti-semitic” stickers, and encouraging or assisting the commission of the offence of racially aggravated criminal damage.
Speaking to GB News about the case, FSU General Secretary 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,” he said, adding: “It cannot be one law for right-wing white working-class men and another for left-wing politicians.”
Sam Melia, a regional organiser for right-wing organisation Patriotic Alternative, was in charge of an online collection of downloadable stickers that contained various anti-immigration messages for activists of the ‘Hundred Handers’ group.
At Leeds Crown Court last month Melia was also found guilty of encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage because his collection was implicated in multiple “stickering” incidents.
During the trial, jurors were told that Melia administered an encrypted social media channel that had over 3,500 subscribers, and that members of the group would access the downloadable stickers before then sticking them up around their communities. The prosecution argued that the stickers were intended to stir up racial hatred.
Melia was charged in December 2022 after evidence showed he established and maintained the database of around 200 stickers. Counter Terrorism Policing North East said that many of the stickers were “racist” and “antisemitic” in nature. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), in its summary of the case, says that when Melia was arrested in April 2021, police “found in his wallet“ stickers that expressed “views of a nationalist nature”.
The stickers reportedly contained slogans such as “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066”, “Mass immigration is white genocide”, “Labour loves Muslim rape gangs”, “Mass immigration is white genocide”, “intolerance is a virtue” and “they seek conquest not asylum”.
In court, Melia did not shy away from his views, describing himself as “pro-British and [a] white advocate”, but instead sought to frame his defence as a free-speech issue. While he accepted that some people might find the stickers offensive, he argued that they were intended to “start a conversation” and taking offence was a “subjective reaction”. He also said he was unaware that the stickering would count as criminal damage.
Writing for Spiked, Prof Andrew Tettenborn felt it was particularly concerning that the charge of ‘criminal damage’ was brought against Melia on the basis that he had used stickers to express himself. Essentially, the court found that he had supplied the stickers knowing that the recipients might attach them to other people’s property without permission. “This flimsy argument,” Prof Tettenborn says, “could be used against almost any activist in future. If you hand out stickers at a rally in support of, say, gender-critical feminism, you could end up in court on the basis that some of them are likely to be fly-posted.”
In its summary of the case, the CPS recounts that when police searched Melia’s home, they “discovered a book by Oswald Mosley’ and ‘a poster of Adolf Hitler”. In court, says the CPS, these artefacts were offered as “key signs of Melia’s ideology” – as in, his system of ideas and ideals.
So it wasn’t just his technical stirring up of racial hatred that landed him in the dock and later in a cell, says Brendan O’Neill – it was also his ideological beliefs, his moral convictions. “No one – not a troublemaking Leninist, not a man-hating feminist and not a Mosley-reading fascist – should ever be taken to court for what they think,” he says. “That, surely, is the first principle of free speech.”
Following Melia’s sentencing, Detective Chief Superintendent James Dunkerley, Head of Counter Terrorism Policing North East, said: “Evidence shows that large numbers of these stickers appeared both here in the UK and a number abroad.”
He added: “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.”
