Forget the Thursday-night clapping and rainbows in the windows: the NHS is perennially underfunded and its staff undervalued, by conservative governments as well as by people who rely on it. 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.

The idea that the UK is in the midst of a ‘ care crisis’ is both a commonplace of British politics and seemingly impervious to solution. Even on the most basic healthcare insurance, after the birth of my child I spent five days in hospital recovering from an emergency C-section, which is considered normal here but contrasts to three to four days in the UK. Bunting offers powerful testimony from workers in the private care sector frustrated by their inability to give the attention they believe their clients need because their time is parcelled into small packets. However, at the heart of the book is the care that is central to what makes us human and the best of us as humans. Immigration has filled labour gaps, but in the aftermath of Brexit (and the COVID-19 pandemic) many sources of migrant workers have dried up.why would politicians seeking the approval of voters nevertheless fail to support and recognise the one thing that all voters admire? Deemed purely intuitive, relational and routine, it is frequently devalued by medicine’s emphasis on the rational or scientific. 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. The alarm clock gives us a reason to get up in the morning, the expectations of colleagues or clients give us a reason to do our jobs well, the misery in developing countries . But that feels a lot like low-hanging fruit, compared with what the author identifies is a much bigger problem of just how difficult it is to be an effective carer to anyone who isn’t a close and loved family member.

Residential care, she maintains, has long been “custodial”; the welfare state was not designed for our ageing population. She also notes that hands-on caring puts one in touch with vulnerability, dependency, ageing and mortality. 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. Caring is the key to human existence, yet it can be very challenging, especially when it remains marginalised in every sense.Blending these testimonies with a history and language of care, and with her own experiences of caring for the young and old in her family, 'Labours of Love' paints a portrait of our nation today - and of how it might be. Yet little is known about how people in India cope with dementia, how relationships and identities change through illness and loss. It explains why there are massive staff shortages, and the suicide rate of care workers is now twice the national average.

Bunting situates the contemporary care deficit as both the product of austerity policies and an accompanying managerial culture which reduces care to a quantifiable service deliverable, a set of tasks allocated to the lowest level of skill possible. It made me think about things about my life (and death) that I have never thought about and it made me feel things that I didn’t think were possible and more importantly it paints a picture of a crumbling system and the millions of lives that depend on it. It seems tied up in Bunting’s fight for well-resourced health and social services is the very struggle for recognition that disabled, sick and elderly people have a right to exist in warranting such costs. 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. The author of 'The Queen of Whale Key' and 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher' has found a new subject with which to amaze us: the case of the 'Croydon Poltergeist' and its investigation by the N.As we address issues of the pandemic, Brexit and associated policies on migration and changing demographics that see our population ageing we also face stark choices about how we care for the most vulnerable among us. They were working harder than ever, often still living with ‘in-work poverty’, their lives frequently at risk, and many already snuffed out by Covid-19. Feminism won a new role for women in the world of work, but the workplace is organised around the imperatives of productivity and efficiency, while parenting requires patience and the acceptance of distractions and interruptions. Bunting argues that ‘care is the feminist issue’ (3) because its burdens fall unevenly on (some) women. Women were conspicuously absent from 18 th century economic thought, their care duties relegated to the private domain, considered a natural aptitude rather than a valuable form of labour that sustained the market.

Used to the NHS, I found the process of browsing for a healthcare provider as if it was car insurance unsettling when I first moved here. 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. Finally, there is a selection of book reviews such as Branko Milanovic's review of Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea by Darrin M. She has a longstanding interest in contemplative practices and in 2013 she co-founded The Mindfulness Initiative to explore the potential of mindfulness in public policy particularly health and education.Let’s do more, we need to support this sector or there will be nothing left for us and our children! 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. Britain’s society lauds economic growth, productivity and profit over compassion, kindness and empathy. As we face a second wave of Covid-19, there are more proposals for reinvestment in the care economy, for the redesign of welfare, for collective solutions that might revalue jobs in care. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.