• SHOPLIFTING in the West End has hit the news.

In our dreadful era of decreasing benefits, and food banks under pressure, let’s dare to speak out.

These awfully swish West End shops are a provocation to the poor.

I have little sympathy for the posh places down an increasingly gaudy Oxford Street, where cruel wealth brags, boasts, shows off, displays itself and, in effect, gloats over the humiliation to be found in run-down housing estates.

Back in 1840 the self-declared French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon grimly observed that “property is theft” (In his What is Property: or an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government).

Are shoplifters in fact revolutionaries against West End capitalism?

There’s no massive media focus on the cruel tax evasion of deceitful billionaires is there?

ZEKRIA IBRAHIMI, W12