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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.

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.

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.”

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.