Somehow, values need to change, but she says little on the political mechanisms needed for confronting the predatory capitalism underpinning the neglect and early death of swathes of humanity. It explains why there are massive staff shortages, and the suicide rate of care workers is now twice the national average. Outside the NHS, the picture is even worse: while healthcare funding has at least been ring-fenced, social care has not – and the pressures are ballooning along with our ageing population. Let’s do more, we need to support this sector or there will be nothing left for us and our children! There are a wide range of other articles including 'Unlocking the Pensions Debate: The Origins and Future of the ‘Triple Lock’ by Jonathan Portes and 'The Politics of England: National Identities and Political Englishness' by John Denham and Lawrence Mckay.

At the moment, we’re fighting a running battle because when a child goes into residential care, your benefits go into chaos… I now have to fill out a form every six weeks to account for the dates he was home, and then they recalculate the benefits. Bunting forwards the argument that the invisibility of care through centuries of Western thought is to blame.Today, the ‘care sector’ is a fast-growing part of the economy and increasingly in the hands of the private sector: ‘Care has become a thing, subject to consumers’ desires, and available as part of a monetary transaction’ (25). Women dominate caring professions such as nursing (89 per cent), social work (75 per cent) and childcare (98 per cent). In this remarkable and compassionate book, Madeleine Bunting speaks to those on the front line of the care crisis, struggling to hold together a crumbling infrastructure. Bunting is especially moving on the parents of disabled children, who recount how they have spent endless hours fighting for minimal rights for their children, filling in complicated, weighty forms, almost impossible to complete.

It has left more people finally wondering why care itself has been for so long undervalued—paid or unpaid—despite being one of the most valuable of all forms of human labour. In Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care , Madeleine Bunting astutely examines the often invisible world of care, showing how swathes of the care economy remain hidden and undervalued. See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down. Whether in surgeries or hospitals, she finds that underfunding and bureaucratic surveillance leaves doctors and nurses vastly overworked, doing as much form-filling as patient care, leading to burnout, staff losses and recruitment failures.

This book made me feel alternately happy and sad - the idea of 'care' is bandied about so lightly as if it is easy to do, but Bunting makes clear that it is absolutely a skilled and technical job - just one that is undervalued and easy to misunderstand. It is slow paced – unsurprisingly considering the scope and wight of the material – but still gripping. She thereby traduces the transformative politics of second wave feminism, with all its commitment to shared childcare, nurseries, community building, and the promotion of democratised caring infrastructures for wellbeing overall. SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING Long before the pandemic, care work has been underpaid and its values disregarded. Part policy exploration, part history, part memoir, and part anthropological study, this is a detailed and deeply worrying take on the state of modern British healthcare – the most loved and trusted part of the British State that has been under constant attack for decades.

The author looks at the devaluing of care from cradle to grave, especially the way that is both gendered and discriminatory in other ways around disability and a workforce that’s badly paid, poorly respect3d and disproportionately drawn from BAME communities. Personal and societal problems are ‘solved’ by the purchase of care in the market, but this kind of care is itself governed by the rules of efficiency. Do we believe as a country that we are both respecting and paying properly for the humane, often intimate, care that they give every day. It asks important questions about the deficit of care in our society, to which there are no easy answers.We do our best to select used books that are in fantastic condition, however there may be some defects on the cover or pages. Bunting emphasises that a large part of the undervaluing of caring is its perception as intuitively ‘feminine’, barely recognised as work, let alone requiring any skill. Labours of Love weaves together her experience shadowing employees across the care sector – nurses, doctors, social workers, in-home carers, care home workers – with context on the funding of public services.

I would have preferred a little more exploration on the crisis in care for older people which to me as the most acute aspect of the overall catastrophe. The recruitment and retention of nurses has been damaged by below inflation pay increases from 2010 to 2018, with a shortfall of 108,000 nurses predicted by 2029. Paid or unpaid, the quality of care in our lives is nothing less than sociality itself: it is an index of how we survive as a society and a species.But Labours of Love is an important and unsettling reminder that we can’t afford to wait for the next crisis, because the health system on which we all depend is itself in intensive care. GPs are also struggling, with practice closures accelerating from 2013 despite government pledges to help. Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications that are exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers. We first experience bodily care as infants, Bunting notes, and many of the questions that run through her book originated in her early days of motherhood. Yet in a modern, industrialised society like ours, with an increasing population, it must often be paid for and given to us by those we do not know.