Samuel Melia Leeds: Pudsey white supremacist ‘with Nazi tendencies’ jailed after sticker campaign

Samuel Melia was locked up for two years by a judge at Leeds Crown Court, who said antisemitism “has been used before to tear at the heart of Western democracy” and “it must not be allowed to do so again”.

The 34-year-old was found guilty earlier this year of stirring up racial hatred by running an online library of downloadable white supremacist stickers.

Melia was the head of the Hundred Handers, an anonymous group responsible for a spate of anti-immigration “stickering” incidents between 2019 and 2021, Leeds Crown Court heard.

On Friday, Judge Tom Bayliss KC 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 antisemite.”

He added: “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, antisemitism becoming normalised on our streets.

“The publication of this kind of material is corrosive to our society and highly damaging. Antisemitism, in particular, is a destructive force.

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“It has been used before to tear at the heart of Western democracy. It must not be allowed to do so again.”

Judge Bayliss outlined some of the ethnic slurs about a range of groups Melia used on Telegram channels, telling him: “You clearly demonstrate a deep-seated antipathy to those groups, and you do so by your uninhibited use of language that no right-thinking person would ever consider appropriate.”

He said: “The fact that you have Nazi sympathies couldn’t be clearer.

“In your garage you had on display a poster of Hitler, sporting the legend ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer’ and a Nazi Eagle, a symbol developed originally by the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1920s and which became a symbol of the German government after the Nazis took power.

“You even posted a picture of Hitler to a Telegram account, describing him as ‘our uncle’.”

Judge Bayliss pointed to Melia’s deliberate referencing of so-called grooming gang court cases and his “obsessive interest” in Sir Oswald Mosley.

He told the defendant: “You were engaged in a campaign of hatred against minority communities and you were, I am sure, quite deliberately trying to stir up racial hatred.”

The judge said: “In his speeches, Sir Oswald Mosley accused the Jews of aiming at world domination, of controlling the City of London and the press.

“Almost a century later, and after the Holocaust, you were peddling the same antisemitism.”