“The sentence would have been much longer had you actually committed a crime.” Did a British judge really say this back in 2024 when sending an innocent man to prison? I have seen the quote reproduced online as fact, but it turns out it was in fact an attempt at satire; clearly, a British judge would never do or say anything as reprehensible and ridiculous as that. Instead, all the latter-day Pontius Pilate did to the man standing there in the dock before him that day was hand him down two full years behind bars for the heinous ‘offence’ of designing some stickers.

The ‘criminal’ in question was Sam Melia, a pro-white activist and member of the non-proscribed organisation Patriotic Alternative who was famously prosecuted for maintaining an online archive of stickers containing anti-immigration slogans like “Diversity did not build Britain”, “Labour loves Muslim rape-gangs”, “They seek conquest, not asylum”, “There is a war on whites”, and “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066”, all of which are arguably true statements. However, as Melia genuinely was told during his trial: “The truth is no defence in court.”

So, for example, when Melia provided others with access to stickers pointing out Pakistani rape-gangs were abusing white children up and down the nation, the fact this was demonstrably true could not defend him from facing charges of “intent to distribute material meant to incite racial hatred”.

Some labels stick

Melia is now free from prison, and has a new book out, Legal, Truthful, Guilty: Diary of a Political Prisoner. But, given the incendiary nature of its contents, he might soon be doing time in chokey once again.

There was some controversy on the Daily Sceptic following Melia’s conviction, with one article saying he deserved his fate and another saying he didn’t. There were several other semi-supportive online comment pieces at the time, including one from me, arguing it was oppressive to sentence a man to jail for mere ‘sticker-crimes’; all were careful to point out they didn’t necessarily support all of what Melia was saying, merely his right to say it. Infinitely worse than precisely what Melia said in his stickers, though, is the highly disturbing way the British state treated him for exercising his right to free speech.

A sticky situation

Melia writes in his book that he hit upon spreading his message via stickers in the wake of the excessive online censorship regime which arose following Donald Trump’s first election win in 2016, when dissident social media accounts were being shut down all over. Twitter censors couldn’t peel down stickers from walls, though, so Melia thought an accessible online archive was one way around the problem. To stay within the law, he reckoned it best to emphasise a “pro-white” rather than “anti-non-white” line of argument so he couldn’t be accused of inciting racial hatred – or so Sam thought.  

In court, he says it was proven the content of all his 300-plus stickers was “extreme but lawful”, as lawyers had it. So how come he was able to be convicted? For one thing, he was charged with facilitating “criminal damage”, as providing stickers intended to be placed on public street-furniture technically constitutes vandalism – although, given the number of Young Communist League stickers I see all over the place every day, and still for sale openly online, I presume the Crown only ever bothers to charge perceived Right-wing sticker-addicts for this offence.

We should also recall that “intent to distribute material meant to incite racial hatred” was the charge Melia faced. If his stickers’ messages were not illegal in themselves, and were often outright factual, the Crown’s case had to hinge upon the idea that the wholly unspoken subliminal intent allegedly lying behind such messages was to nefariously incite racial hatred among those who read them, regardless of what they actually said. Consider the below sticker:

Displayed in Rotherham or Rochdale, that would just be a demonstrable fact. But, being psychic, a malicious prosecutor could claim its true, silent, final clause here reads: ‘So burn down your local mosque with everyone locked inside immediately!’ Another related line of prosecution argument was that, whilst Melia hadn’t yet designed any illegal stickers, he may have possessed the intent to do so, eventually – even though he had pursued his project for six full years without ever falling into this trap, and had already abandoned it for good at the time of his arrest.

When apprehended in April 2021, Sam also faced potential charges of “international financial conspiracy”, as counter-terror officers pretended to believe nefarious foreign agents like Vladimir Putin were funding his whole escapade to foment racial rebellion. As the only noticeable expense on Melia’s part was purchasing a second-hand label-printer on eBay for £10 to test how his stickers looked off-screen, this would have been the cheapest revolution the Kremlin had ever staged. Nonetheless, by shouting ‘Russia!’ to a gullible magistrate, the authorities were able to gain a warrant to search Melia’s home hoping to find guns and roubles, none of which were there, so they just settled for legally stealing all his laptops and phones instead, before destroying his hard-drive.

Upon arrest, police tried out their future Lucy Connolly tactics early and lied that the ‘terrorist’ could face 10 years in prison if he didn’t co-operate (i.e., plead guilty, presumably). When his solicitor arrived, he told Melia the maximum sentence available was only five years anyway. It then took authorities around two years to decide whether to even charge Melia or not, all while imposing strict bail conditions on him nonetheless, like preventing him from leaving his home overnight, so he could be pre-punished ahead of schedule.

Eventually, his trial came to pass, with most evidence presented being pathetic; a joke poster of Hitler hanging in a rented garage, for example, supposedly meant he was a Nazi. Melia didn’t deny being a white advocate, wanting mass deportations, etc. – but such positions are not illegal. He completely denied promoting racial hatred and attacks, merely a sort of non-violent ethno-political self-defence.

Found guilty, Melia’s lawyer told him to expect a suspended sentence due to the trivial nature of his ‘offences’. However, the judge then handed him two years regardless, because, at the time of the trial, pro-Palestine protesters were making threats of violence against MPs, and so he had to “set an example” to political dissidents everywhere – by effectively sending Melia to prison for someone else’s crimes. Imagine a driver turning up to court expecting a simple speeding fine and being sentenced to death because some other motorist had deliberately crashed their car into a bus full of screaming schoolchildren.         

Stuck behind bars

Once convicted, Melia was classified as a Category B offender, meaning potentially violent or terroristic in nature, and therefore banged up with people who were actually violent or terroristic in nature, who spent their days throwing kettles of boiling water over one another and biting their cellmates’ ears off. There were also loads of paedophiles in Melia’s jails, too – most of whom, as he noted whilst watching them being led off to prayers, being Muslims, he claimed. If he had written this awkward observation on a sticker, Sam’s sentence may have been doubled.

Soon also turning up to rot with him in Category B hell were various ‘rioters’ from the post-Southport protests of 2024. One told him he was helping an old woman shoved to the floor by cops, when their dogs tore a chunk from his leg and ate it, leaving him in a wheelchair. In a police cell awaiting possible amputation, police ‘forgot’ to feed him for two whole days. Maybe he should have just eaten the rest of his now useless leg? Another ‘rioter’ said he was told by a judge that he didn’t deserve a custodial sentence but that, due to all the media attention, he felt obliged to give him one anyway. In any sane society, all the media attention would be focused on the judge’s admission as being the true scandal here. Another got two years and eight months for chanting “Allah is a paedo!” and asking a police officer “What happens when this is a Muslim country and 50 year-old men are allowed to marry your granddaughter?” The policeman is said to have replied that “I agree with you, mate”, but still he was imprisoned for making racist comments. And the state’s employees wonders why people hate them?

As at the end of 1984, Big Brother wants Winston to give in and admit he loves him following his torture, so as a ‘terrorist’ Melia was subjected to endless risible mental reprogramming attempts by probation officers, counter-terror Stasi and social workers. Their arguments were universally awful, however. Prosecutors ask why he cares about the rape-gang victims so much when he doesn’t know them himself personally. Melia should have asked people like this whether they knew George Floyd or any precious Palestinians personally, and if not, why won’t they ever STFU about them?

For purported anti-terror experts, his persecutors don’t seem terribly well-informed. One is said to have confided to him that their work computers won’t allow them to access the websites of the ‘extremist organisations’ they are meant to closely monitor, due to their alleged offensive content; instead, they must rely on reading second-hand accounts of their activities from politically approved sites like that of Hope Not Hate, the equivalent of basing your entire worldview of mice upon a book written by a cat. (Hope Not Hate is the gang who first outed Melia as the man behind the stickers in the first place, by the way – he denies several other allegations it also made about him, such as being a member of the banned far-Right group National Action.) Another commissar is said to admit he knew about the Muslim rape-gangs himself personally, before the whole scandal eventually came out, observing childhood victims with his own eyes, but did basically nothing, such was his commitment to the grand multicultural project – a real case of the guilty punishing the innocent.

The sheer idiocy of these apparatchiks is incredible. One reason Melia says they advanced for his attempted brainwashing (by the brainless) is that he and Tommy Robinson “may become friends” after he is released, even though they have never met. The state’s attempts to ‘realign Mr Melia’s mindset’ fail, however, with one particularly retarded report recording sadly that: “He thinks Black people aren’t White British.” Next he’ll be saying trans women aren’t women.

Stuck up fools

Even when released from prison, Melia is forced to live in a halfway house with feckless druggies for 12 months and subjected to various ridiculous restrictions upon his liberty. When offered work with a home-maintenance firm, probation demands any householders must be off-premises when he is on-site, lest he radicalise them into becoming Nazi nail-bombers whilst injecting their cavity-wall insulation.

In this same vein, Sam is also subject to regular threats to take his children away lest he radicalise them, too, even though they are only babies. As Melia notes, it’s a shame the authorities didn’t care enough about child safety to stop the grooming-gangs. He also observes that, whilse inside and kept away from his own kids on visits, a paedophile who expresses the open desire to “destroy” the orifices of new-born infants and leave them wearing nappies for life is handed a non-custodial suspended sentence.

Melia’s new book, written as a prison diary, is filled with appalling dispatches from the low-grade Gulag Archipelago that 30 years’ worth of successive traitors to their own nation, from Blair to Starmer, have now built for us. Supposedly, he is an ‘extremist’, but he comes across as way, way, less criminal than the true criminals who locked him up in the first place.

The more people who read this book the better, as it will help ensure that the state’s malicious prosecution of Melia transforms him into a free speech martyr, thus hopefully making our rulers’ oppressions backfire upon them. That may be our best defence against receiving similar treatment ourselves someday. Don’t let the true totalitarians glue a sticker over your own mouth: tell everyone you know about what happened to this man.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books.