“Britain is no longer a free country.” Such is the rash conclusion being drawn from the case of Sam Melia—an anti-immigration activist who late last week was sentenced to two years in prison for “inciting racial hatred.” His offence? Making and distributing stickers with slogans like “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066” and “Stop mass immigration.” Other tags included “Reject white guilt,” “Stop anti-white rape gangs,” and “Love your nation.”
Really, the verdict that Britain has ceased to be free is much too hasty. It would be truer to say that Britain has ceased to be free for a certain kind of person: namely, those of us whose ancestors built the country and who, owing to this heritage, have no other place in the world to call home.
Everyone else, of course, stands a much better chance of reading Milton’s Areopagitica (should they care to do so) and concluding that its principles still reign in the birthplace of the poet who wrote it. It may even occur to foreigners residing in Britain, given some of the things they are able to get away with as guests in this country, that England’s love for the known rules of ancient liberty has mutated, rather conveniently for them, into an indulgent cult of pathological altruism.
The malicious vigour with which the British state pursued Melia is even more disgraceful when considered alongside other cases.
Bahar Mustafa, born in London but of Turkish Cypriot ancestry, was treated with kid-gloves by the Metropolitan Police in 2015 after posting “kill all white men” on her social media. Far from throwing Mustafa behind bars, all charges against this violent-minded, anti-white agitator were summarily dropped.
There is also the more recent example of Abdul Ezedi, the Afghan illegal immigrant who just a few weeks ago hurled acid in the face of a woman, inflicting life–changing injuries, on the streets of Clapham. It then came to light that Ezedi had been found guilty of sexual assault and indecent exposure back in 2018, but within a matter of years—roughly the same amount of time Melia will spend in prison, to be precise—he was granted asylum for pretending to be a Christian.
Andrew Tettenborn, a legal scholar, exposes the absurd reasoning of the prosecution in Melia’s case:
One of the counts against him [Melia] was for his use of stickers to express himself. This is what the charge of ‘criminal damage’ refers to in his case. 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 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.
Still, venturing into the legal weeds is just one of the more honourable ways of missing the point. Melia’s case is best understood as the latest proof of our descent into ‘anarcho-tyranny.’ As I wrote recently, this refers to a sinister state of affairs whereby, far from living in a law-governed country, the most basic rules are gleefully broken by anti-social delinquents. At the same time, their civilised betters are forcibly entangled in an ever-expanding web of dictates, constraints, and speech codes.
When the regime’s agents will behave like anarchists and when they will behave like tyrants is so easily predictable in advance as to be child’s play. If one of their accredited victim groups commits a crime, the approach will be plodding, permissive, and as pathetic as the law can be diluted to allow; if one of these same victim group’s claim to sanctity is felt to be threatened by a certified oppressor, the approach will be swift, despotic, and as severe as the law can be stretched to authorise.
The formula is no more complicated than this. Sam Melia, along with his heavily pregnant wife who flanked him outside the courthouse prior to sentencing, is simply its latest victim. Whether we like Melia, his apparent views, or his taste in historical memorabilia is an irrelevant distraction.
‘Under a supposedly Conservative government of fourteen years’ standing!’ may be the cliché of our age (particularly among right-wing doom-scrollers), but the persecution of Melia should be remembered by everyone who professes to care about free speech when the Tories seek re-election later this year. Difficult cases, not easy ones, are the real tests of principle.
Last Friday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made the coward’s move of putting the grave, glaring, and increasingly emboldened threat of Islamism on a par with the amorphous, notoriously shape-shifting spectre of ‘far-right extremism.’ Both Islamist extremists and the far-right, according to the unelected Sunak,
are equally desperate to pretend that their violence is somehow justified, when actually these groups are two sides of the same extremist coin. Neither group accept [forgive the grammar; it is not mine] that change in our country can only come through the peaceful democratic process.
What democratic process? A state that continues to import new immigrant voters not only without the consent of British voters, but in clear defiance of their wishes as expressed consistently at the ballot box, may be many things, but it is not a democracy. Sunak did not vow to rectify this original betrayal with a drastic turnaround. Instead, he announced “a new robust framework” for dealing with ‘extremism’—measures that will no doubt include further speech codes designed to hold the ragged tapestry of ‘multicultural Britain’ together, at least until the next crisis hits.
Rather than clean up their own mess, it has become the habit of our political class to externalise the costs onto us. The result in this case? A less free, more heavily surveilled society in which our vindictive colonisers and those of us who resent their presence here are jointly classed as dangerous ‘extremists,’ both equally liable to inflame the ‘community relations’ which are at other times hailed as our greatest strength. Diversity, it turns out, requires not only a formidable battery of legal reinforcements, but a culture of schizophrenia, for its hidden treasures to be made manifest.
Frankly, almost none of what gets tarred with the ‘far-right’ brush would even exist without the treachery of our political elites. From Tony Blair to Boris Johnson, we have been governed by cretins who are quite happy to subject the founding population of this country to staggering levels of replacement migration, an effective process of unarmed demographic conquest, without so much as a vote being cast in its favour or a shot fired in defence. Melia was not wrong in warning us that, should this continue, the Anglo-Celtic people whose ancestors built Britain will by the middle of the present century be a minority in their own homeland.
Does that sound like a desirable fate? The fact that an honest response now carries the risk of being hurled into prison should be answer enough.