Meet the latest recruit to be welcomed into Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain – one of the UK’s most notorious nazis who was linked to a neo-nazi terror group.
Sam Melia, a leading member of Patriotic Alternative only recently released from jail, revealed yesterday that he has joined Restore and that he would be keen to stand for parliament representing the party.
Melia is the husband of PA Deputy Leader Laura Towler and was jailed in 2024 for running an online library of racist, antisemitic and white‑supremacist stickers intended for supporters to print and distribute in public spaces.
The prosecution described the operation as a deliberate attempt to seed hatred anonymously across towns and cities, using anonymous propaganda to avoid detection.
The jury found that Melia curated the material, encouraged its dissemination and provided the infrastructure – the ‘Hundred Handers’ – that allowed others to spread it.
Nazi sympathies
During sentencing, the judge described him as an antisemite with clear Nazi sympathies, and referred to items found in his home when police raided him in 2012, which included a poster of Adolf Hitler, Nazi emblems and literature reflecting an “obsessive interest” in Oswald Mosley.
Although he received a two‑year custodial sentence, Melia served only ten months before being released in 2025 under an early‑release scheme introduced to ease pressure on the prison system.
But even before that, Melia had been connected with the now-banned nazi terror group National Action.
In 2016 he was photographed marching with the group in Darlington, and a year later was pictured with a group of nazis which included NA’s leader Chris Lythgoe. This was six months after National Action had been banned.
Preparing terrorism
National Action was the first organisation banned under UK terrorism legislation since the Second World War.
It’s spokesman Jack Renshaw was convicted in 2018 of stirring up racial hatred, inciting a child to engage in sexual activity, and, most gravely, preparing an act of terrorism in which he planned to murder Labour MP Rosie Cooper and a police officer.
He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
National Action was banned in December 2016 after the UK government formally designated it a terrorist organisation.
‘Concerned with terrorism’
The Home Secretary’s order, laid before Parliament under the Terrorism Act 2000, was passed after the government assessed that the group was “concerned in terrorism”, citing its violent neo‑Nazi ideology, its use of extreme propaganda, and its celebration of political violence, including its praise for the murder of MP Jo Cox.
This is the group that Melia marched with shortly before it was banned.
A collection of the country’s most prominent nazis and holocaust deniers including Steve Laws and Sam Wilkes have now joined Restore Britain without any difficulty. And perhaps the most extraordinary joiner – till now – has been the US nazi Jared Taylor, who is banned from entering the UK because of his extremist views.
Perhaps it’s time for Rupert Lowe to ask himself exactly what it is that makes Restore Britain so attractive to people like this.
