More than 500 Zimbabwean exiles packed into the unlikely setting of the Lewsey Community Centre in Luton. They wore T-shirts proclaiming “Free Zimbabwe” and “Mugabe Must Go”. They roared support when Morgan Tsvangirai, the Zimbabwe opposition leader, arrived to address them. They long for the end of Robert Mugabe’s hated regime. The paradox is that they are actually propping it up.

Everyone The Times approached at the rally last Saturday was sending money to desperate relatives in Zimbabwe. Most were scrimping and saving to remit £50, £100 or £200 each month. Some were doing two jobs to prevent their families in Harare or Bulawayo from starving. Some were single-handedly supporting a dozen or more dependents.

Between three and four million people – a quarter of Zimbabwe’s population – have left the country as its economy has collapsed. Half of Zimbabwe’s households now depend on their remittances, according to a survey by Global Poverty Research. Of those exiles at least 500,000 are thought to be living in Britain, more than in any other country except South Africa. They remit more than any other country – upward of £25 million each month by some estimates.

It is money that saves their families from starving, but it also relieves the worst of Zimbabwe’s suffering and frees up hard currency for the regime. “It’s doing a wonderful job of propping up Mugabe,” said John Robertson, a Harare economist. Without it “families would be much hungrier and much angrier”.

With 80 per cent of their compatriots unemployed, and even those with jobs having their salaries rendered worthless by an inflation rate of 4,500 per cent, the Zimbabweans at the Luton rally argued – entirely reasonably – that they had no alternative.

“You don’t want to prop up the regime but you have no choice,” said Tafadzwa Kays, 25, a computer science student at the University of Leicester who works as a cleaner or waiter by night.

Wilf Mbanga, editor of The Zimbabwean newspaper, which is published in Britain, explained the predicament. “They know in their hearts that it helps Mugabe, but the overriding thing is that you can’t sit there and watch your mother dying of hunger when you can send money home.”

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