The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Women’s Budget Group. Though they are frequently worn out from the Sisyphean labour of “rolling back anguish”, the care workers she speaks to remain endlessly curious about their patients or clients, wanting to hear life stories. As Bunting explains, part of the knotty problem we’re facing today is the decade of austerity that followed the financial crisis of 2008. 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.

Meanwhile, with community resources and respite leave disappearing, home carers also find it ever harder to manage, whoever they are nurturing. 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. She shows that care relies simultaneously on expertise and matriculated skills, and on tacit knowledge, the power of touch and wordless reassurance. 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.Bunting argues that this culture of consumerism within public services was ushered in by the New Labour governments of the 2000s and subsequently, care has been increasingly redefined in business terms, as a matter of financial prudence. She affirms that the urge to care is a basic human proclivity, along with the potential reciprocity of caring relations. Over five years, Madeleine Bunting travelled the country, speaking to charity workers, doctors, social workers, in-home carers, nurses, palliative care teams and parents, to explore the value of care, the hidden glue that binds us together.

In one chapter, Bunting arrives at the offices of a voluntary-sector organization which supports families with a disabled child.For centuries the caring labours of women have been taken for granted, but with more women now in work, with increasing numbers of elderly and with austerity dismantling the welfare state, care is under pressure as never before. Labours of Love ] should be compulsory reading for every MP, every manager in the NHS and the care 'industry' . 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.