Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care

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I am guilty myself of downplaying my role as a nurse, when I hold a position of great education and responsibility and I work hard to provide good care for every one I come into contact with.

Short sections between chapters on the history of individual keywords – care, empathy, kindness, compassion, pity, dependence, suffering – offer food for thought. She is the author of many non-fiction books, including The Plot: A Biography of My Father's English Acre , which won the Portico Prize, and Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey , which was shortlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize and the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year. This features articles such as 'Independence is not Going Away: The Importance of Education and Birth Cohorts' by Lindsay Paterson; 'Diary of an SNP First Minister: A Chronopolitics of Proximity and Priorities' by Hannah Graham; and 'Politics, the Constitution and the Independence Movement in Scotland since Devolution' by Malcolm Petrie.Within the current climate the book provides an answer to those questioning how we reached this point and what political and cultural shifts are required to repair our starved care systems. With a background in history, journalism and politics, the author is well placed to comment on current events. Bunting collates compelling stories from across the care sector to celebrate the tenacity, sacrifice and achievements of its employees, to critique the unsustainable system they work in and to offer an elegiac analysis of what it means to care and be cared for in modern England. View image in fullscreen Sculptor Luke Perry’s medical worker, installed at a park near Birmingham, a tribute to care workers during the coronavirus pandemic. She wrote about a wide range of subjects including Islam, faith, global development, politics and social change.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. See our Remarkables Archive list for what is no longer in print, but which we are happy to track down. 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. Moving on to residential care, she was appalled by the regimen, shocked to see a worker wash the face of a client still fast asleep. A further dimension of the health and social care crisis Bunting explores in her book relates to its commercialisation.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.

Separating out hands-on care from the caring infrastructures necessary to enable it, including more indirect but interlinked sustaining practices, Bunting does not expand on the forms of community building, or radical municipalism, which are essential for repairing care. With everybody now working long hours in paid work, caring has been increasingly outsourced and privatised, while a new managerial vernacular now dominates caring professions.This places care firmly at odds with hegemonic market ideologies fetishising youth, individual resilience, ambition and productivity, thereby deepening the disavowal of human needs other than for self-care.

Computer technology puts everyone behind a screen and lands the burden of “data management” on to care workers or claimants.This odd dismissal comes from her reducing feminism from its beginning to a largely media celebrated liberal variant of aspirational feminism. One social worker Bunting speaks with describes the trauma endured when cutting support desperate families rely on, leading him to have a breakdown and retrain in another field. Sometimes, it is the main criteria by which care work is assessed and inspected, creating a cycle of behaviour which prioritises bureaucracy over people. After all, the attentive, spontaneous nature of good caring relations involves those more subtle, tactile, visceral qualities necessary for communicating understanding, reassurance, comfort—far harder to encapsulate, let alone measure. Horrifying, but deeply important, Labours of Love encourages the reader to reflect on what care means to them in broader terms than simply “who will look after me when I am old”.