The assumption that women will provide care to the sick and elderly within their family remains pervasive yet Bunting notes, not viable. Often working alone and supporting people at their most vulnerable (including at the end of their lives) all those involved in care in social care are not just crucial to everyday life but symbolise the kind of nation we want to be.

It leads to her extraordinary caricature: ‘feminism has forged ahead on many fronts … but a recognition and valuing of care is noticeably absent’. Labours of Love ] should be compulsory reading for every MP, every manager in the NHS and the care 'industry' . Bunting puts several benchmarks into comparison with other European countries, noting for example that the average hospital stay in France is 10 days, compared with seven in the UK; and that the ratio of nurses per 100,000 of the population is now almost half the level it is in Sweden, Germany and France. Personal contact is constantly squeezed by the market mechanisms of “efficiency” and financial accountability.The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Women’s Budget Group. Labours of Love combines the techniques of social investigation – Bunting was formerly a Guardian journalist – with a deeply felt ethical inquiry. The most quietly damning line of all in Labours of Love, Madeleine Bunting’s new book on Britain’s collapsing care system, is probably the following.

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. However, apart from the briefest mention, disappointingly Bunting has little to say about the ambivalence and conflicts of caring, a topic many feminists have tackled well. She shows that care is ubiquitous and largely invisible, and she raises vital questions about the place and value of care in British society. Helena Fraser Rowe is a PPE graduate from Goldsmiths University of London, specialising in the position of disabled women in contemporary Britain.

Indeed, increasingly, even rudimentary caring interactions are shrinking, with carers’ time clipped so tightly that even eye contact, let alone a cup of tea, must be avoided. 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. 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. In ‘Labours of Love’, Madeleine Bunting amplifies the voices of those who bear the brunt of the UK’s chronic health and social care crisis.

It explains why there are massive staff shortages, and the suicide rate of care workers is now twice the national average. A further dimension of the health and social care crisis Bunting explores in her book relates to its commercialisation. Surely this is the lesson of 2020, as Bunting suggests in her preface, whilst conveying the hope that the pandemic may indeed engender change.This book should be required reading for anyone interested in care and, as she shows, we probably all should be.