Former editor Rebekah Brooks and her husband, Charlie, are two of six people charged yesterday in connection with the News of the World phone hacking scandal.

The six face prosecution over conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, with charges relating to hiding material from Scotland Yard detectives that includes seven boxes from the archives of News International, other documents, computers and electronic equipment in July last year.

A statement by Alison Levitt QC, principal legal adviser to the Director of Public Prosecutions, declared that Brooks faces three conspiracy charges and all the others charged face one. The charges brought against Brooks, her husband and several immediate associates are the first laid during the 18-month investigation against any of the more than 40 people who remain on police bail. It brings the scandal over the phone hacking of celebrities, politicians and hundreds of others to the very top of Rupert Murdoch’s News International and its international parent, News Corporation.

The maximum penalty for perverting the course of justice is life in prison, but generally involves sentences of several years.

Tenants in east London are being evicted from their homes in the run-up to the London Olympics Games, to be held from July 27. In one case a woman told the BBC that she and her four housemates had been evicted after being given just two weeks to leave. Another couple reported they had been given three weeks to get out.

Seeking to cash in on the Olympics, some private landlords are letting their properties for 20 times the usual rental price during the games. According to one estate agent, some properties, usually rented for £350 per week, were being marketed at £6,000 per week.

Many tenants being thrown out face an almost impossible task of getting rehoused in decent, affordable accommodation. They are being forced onto the streets under conditions where there is already a dire shortage of affordable social housing and with private rents in the capital having already risen by seven percent over the last year.

Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity, said this week it had seen evidence that some tenants are being illegally evicted at the last minute. The Chief Executive at Shelter, Campbell Robb, said, “Londoners living in the Olympic boroughs are already suffering from increasingly unaffordable rents, a lack of stability and a minority of rogue landlords who exploit the high demand for homes in the capital.

World Socialist Web Site reporting teams spoke to some of those who participated in Thursday’s strike against government pension cuts.

Peter in Salford in Greater Manchester has been working in the public sector since 2009.

He explained that like many of his co-workers, he is now paying more in pension contributions, only in order to receive a lesser pension. “Generally speaking I will be forced to pay more for my pension but at the end of it I’ll be receiving less”, he said, “And also I’ll be working longer as well.”

Peter said he was already paying far more into his pension scheme from this month: “In terms of pension contribution increases I’d say that I was paying £80 more a month now.”

Speaking about the austerity measures being imposed, he said, “Ordinary people are being made to pay for the mistakes that the bankers have made. If you cut jobs in the public sector, where are these people going to have to go? They are going to have to go into unemployment and benefits. And then you have to pay the money to pay benefits and it creates a vicious circle.”

The strike called by several UK trade unions on Thursday represented a further stage of the demobilisation of workers in the face of an onslaught on pay, conditions and pensions by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.

Just five months after more than 2 million public sector workers took action on November 30, those participating in Thursday’s strike totalled 400,000 according to the unions, while the government put the number at just 150,000.

The action was called supposedly to oppose government plans to restructure public sector pensions, forcing workers to pay higher contributions and work longer, only to receive less on retirement. Under “final salary” schemes that still exist for some in the public sector, pensions are tied to the rate of pay on retirement. The government wants to replace these with “career average” schemes, providing a lower pension; to add insult to injury, there will be increased employee contributions and a longer qualifying period.

Britain’s Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition laid out its legislative programme for the year in the Queen’s speech to parliament on Wednesday.

It came less than a week after local elections marked by widespread disaffection, as turnout fell to fewer than one in three. Those who did vote registered their opposition to government policy, with the Conservative Party losing more than 800 councillors and the Liberal Democrats reduced to an historic low.

In the wake of the results, Prime Minister David Cameron has faced calls from leading right-wing Tory MPs for more “traditional” Conservative policies. The unofficial Conservative Home web site published an alternative Queen’s speech, containing contributions from former ministers such as John Redwood and David Davies, demanding a referendum on British membership on the European Union, a further crackdown on welfare and immigration, and more “law and order” measures.

Any attempt by Cameron to meet such demands was seen by most media commentators as a threat to the coalition. This wilfully ignores the fact that the fundamental issue uniting the two parties is that there must be no retreat from austerity in the face of popular opposition.

Last weekend, residents at Lexington Building in London’s Bow Quarter received an unexpected item in the post. A leaflet from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) informed them that the Army planned to install a High Velocity Missile system on the roof of the complex, as part of the security arrangements for the 2012 Olympic Games in July.

According to the Army website, these High Velocity Missiles (HVMs) are “designed to counter threats from very high performance low-flying aircraft.” They can travel at more than three times the speed of sound.

The MoD leaflet explains, “The location has been chosen as it is situated close to the Olympic Park and offers an excellent view of the surrounding area and the entire sky above the Olympic Park.” According to the MoD, the Water Tower “proved to be the only suitable site in the area for the HMV system”, as others “suffered from obstructed views and the presence of various health and safety hazards”.

Clearly, the danger to Londoners who might be killed or injured if a missile were fired does not count as a “health and safety hazard.”

The MoD leaflet asks, “Will having missiles on our building make us a target?” and then blandly asserts, “Having a 24/7 Armed Forces and Police presence will improve your local security and will not make you a target for terrorists”.

Nearly 130,000 people, including more than 45,000 children, used food banks operated by the Trussell Trust in the UK last year.

This represents an increase of more than 100 percent over the previous year. The trust is a Christian charity, whose remit is “to empower local communities to combat poverty and exclusion in the UK and Bulgaria.”

People who use its food bank services are given a minimum of a three-day supply of emergency foodstuffs made up of milk, sugar, fruit juice, soup, pasta sauces, tinned fruit, rice and sponge puddings, tinned tomatoes, pasta, tinned meat and other basic staples.

The Trussell Trust is the only body operating food banks in the UK. They are a relatively new phenomenon. A Coventry University report of November 2011 noted that although charitable food assistance programmes were well established in some developed countries such as the US and Canada, they were not common in the UK. But since the early 2000s, there had been a rise in organised food provision “in the form of both community food banks and food redistribution programmes.”

The Trussell Trust established its first food bank in Salisbury in 2000. The first half of 2011 “saw the launch of a new food bank every week.”

Campaign teams spoke to some of those who voted or intended to vote for Socialist Equality Party candidates, Stephen Woodbridge in Bretton North ward, Peterborough, and Danny Dickinson in the St Helens Town Centre ward.

In Peterborough, single mum Denise said, “I am voting for the SEP. I got your leaflet through the door. It said a lot of the things that I have been thinking for some time now about the banks, and war and giving people decent jobs.

“I’ve never voted before because I think that Labour, the Tories and the Liberals are all the same. It is about time that ordinary people had a party of their own. There is plenty of money around. They can find enough when it is needed for wars and for the bankers, but not for us.

“I am worried about my daughter Jade’s future. The world is getting worse instead of better. The rich are never satisfied and want to make us slaves. Well, they better think again. People won’t put up with it. It is good you were in the election. To show people they can do something to change things.”

The decision of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) to abandon a planned strike to defend public sector pensions has caused extreme embarrassment to the Socialist Party.

Not only does the SP have key figures on the PCS executive who backed the decision to call off the strike. But it is in alliance with numerous other pseudo-socialist and Stalinist groups in the Left Unity faction, which in turn works with PCS Democrats, a smaller group that includes various Labourites and a Liberal Democrat local councillor. As the Democracy Alliance, they collectively enjoy a sizeable majority on the executive. There are only three members drawn from the officially designated right wing on the 40-plus committee.

The SP has, in addition, boosted the PCS and its general secretary, Mark Serwotka, as the type of “fighting union” and militant union leader the working class needs—proof of the continued role of the unions more generally in supposedly defending their members.

The PCS was advanced as the head of a group of “rejectionist unions”, who opposed the decision of the larger public sector unions such as the GMB and Unison to end all opposition to government plans to double employee contributions and the switch to the lower index of inflation for public sector pensions.