Yesterday afternoon Sam Melia, Yorkshire regional organiser of Patriotic Alternative, was convicted at Leeds Crown Court on two charges relating to racial nationalist stickers distributed via the Telegram social media platform. He will return to court for sentencing on 1st March.

One charge was under the UK’s notorious laws against “inciting racial hatred”, a concept which the courts now seem to interpret very widely. Legal sources have confirmed to H&D that the stickers for which Sam was convicted would not in the past have been expected to warrant prosecution.

The other charge was of “encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage”. This is again a cynical abuse of UK law by the authorities. Older readers will remember that similar ploys began to be used in the 1990s against the British National Party (then led by John Tyndall). BNP officials were in those days summonsed by local councils holding them responsible for removing stickers from public property such as lampposts and bus shelters, even though other stickers (including “anti-racist” political ones) are commonly displayed in such places.

As racial nationalists we shall need to consider our options very carefully in the light of the apparent determination of police and prosecutors to act as enforcers of an ever more restrictive political orthodoxy.

For now, we are sure that all of our readers will join the H&D team in sending our best wishes to Sam and his wife Laura (PA’s deputy leader) who are presently expecting their second child.

H&D is not part of any political party or group, and we realise that while some readers are PA members, others have had (and continue to have) differences with PA.

Nevertheless, we are confident that all readers will recognise that the prosecution of Sam Melia is an attack not only on PA but on the rights of all British racial nationalists.

Now is not the time for factional debate. Now is the time for total solidarity with our comrades Sam and Laura.

PA have set up a fundraiser to allow the Melia family a holiday before what seems almost certain to be a custodial sentence.

Judge Tom Bayliss has already threatened Sam that “if you start making your views publicly on this [sic], it will not go well for you.” So we must make clear that the views we have posted about this trial on the H&D website or elsewhere are our own words, not Sam’s.

Another disturbing feature of the case (which is typical of several recent political cases) is that police and prosecutors have tried to imply that holding pro-fascist or national socialist political views, or having certain opinions about political history, is itself illegal.

It is not illegal in the UK to take a positive view of Sir Oswald Mosley or Adolf Hitler. It is not illegal in the UK to be a fascist or a national socialist. We note that the “experts” of the Crown Prosecution Service cannot even spell Mosley’s name, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by anything.