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Save St Lukes Early Dementia Service

My local community centre is awesome.  It is a hub of activity for the old and young; it offers services for women and men, a place to talk, to relax, to be entertained, to meet and share with others.  It supports the vulnerable and offers a local friendly place for all and sundry who come through its doors.  When I’m an old biddy, I’ve often said, I will be happier knowing that this place exists, and is a resource that I can trust in.  It genuinely makes the idea of spending the next twenty years in my flat better.

However!  One of the most important services it offers – the early dementia care service – is at risk of closure.  Everyone who reads this blog knows I don’t like the government, and don’t believe that cutting money to the vulnerable and poorest in society while refusing to raise taxes on the richest or in any way spread the cost of economic hardship across society, is a Good Thing.  We are now in a time which forces councils sell off social housing to developers who then re-sell it to the wealthy; where schools are turned into academies where the corporations involved can take the land for their own, at the bare whisper of a contractual flutter.  It’s a situation where NHS executives make hundreds of thousands of pounds while junior doctors are asked to work dangerous hours for poor pay, while being blamed by the government for being lazy.  As a society, we are systematically damaging the ability of the vulnerable to survive, while permitting the richest and the largest institutions to flourish, as if this somehow benefits us all, rather than the few.  But by far and away the most heinous act of this trend is to remove support from people who are unable to fight back.

Dementia is a cruel disease.  It changes everything, brings pain to those who have it and on those who care for the loved ones who experience it.  Our treatment of the elderly – and of those who spend their lives caring for the elderly – in this country is pretty abysmal.  As we fail to pay carers properly, so we fail to support the vulnerable properly, and people who worked their whole lives with the promise of support in their later years are left, instead, with a lifetime of endeavour rewarded by distress and isolation.

Supporting the vulnerable in this situation is one of the most important things we can do.  The story at St. Lukes community centre is nothing unusual for the times; but it is my local and it can often seem that the challenge of a nation is overwhelming.  I think it is important to fight wherever you can see the battle being waged, and with that in mind please support St. Lukes Early Dementia Service, either by signing the petition, or by anything else.

https://www.change.org/p/islington-council-review-the-decision-to-cut-funding-for-early-dementia-service-at-st-luke-s