• AS I went to buy lunch – I can’t afford cafés any more – in the horrible award-winning Sainsbury’s in Camden Town, with its unnerving machine-led counters and dreary aisles, I was met on the door by two young men collecting goods for a food bank.

Being a curious person, I asked them more about it and I learnt that they are from a socialist, “revolutionary” I gathered, group who meet in offices across the road from the supermarket. When I learnt the leaders are Italian, like me, my heart opened with hope.

So, I did some research, with eyes and ears not Google, and alas I learnt that the leaders talk, a lot, and write, a lot, about a faraway messianic future where we will all be fine and poverty will be no more.

The only decisive action they take is the food bank. They call it solidarity.

I was left thinking of the hundreds of fascists that recently assembled in a square in Italy, saluting with the Roman gesture, reminder of a satanic dictatorship that ultimately led to World War II….

When I was young, in the 1980s, this would not have happened because we would have sent them packing.

Now the young who try to protest are met with jail and financial threats, and even deportation, just for marching.

They are not even allowed to protest peacefully for the planet that they will have to bring their children into.

They can’t cover their faces because the billionaires and, yes, trillionaires, who come to this country from all over the world to buy land, torment the sick, starve the poor, build robots to replace striking workers, evict working families so they can make more and more money from their homes, want to make sure that everyone is face- recognised and registered in files, down, deep down in databases that would make George Orwell shake his head and say “I told you so”.

But, hey, we can all look forward to Sir Keir Starmer to give us freedom and look after the poorest in our society. If his government will be anything like its microcosm Camden Council, we can all give up hope.

In the meantime the revolution can bring tinned food to the poor who will surely jump in joy to find a rare piece of chocolate in their donation. Lucky them.

Why do I have the feeling that there are a lot of people who think like me? God is not happy. He loves a fighter.

JOSEPHINE BRUNI, NW5