A news 'scoop' that I was told about at Sandalls Newsagent, Sandall Road, Hereford HR4 told me of when I got my print copy of Hereford Times yesterday was that the November-December 2020 issue of New Internationalist magazine is now in print. (That 'scoop' has not yet made it to the New Internationalist home page!)
In the 'editor's letter', Amy Hall writes:
Home Truths
An innocent question: "How are you feeling about the care magazine?" my housemate asked me over coffee. "Angry" was my answer, in fact, I've spent a large part of the Covid-19 pandemic feeling this way, with the issue of care a major focal point of my rage.
I'm vexed about the glaring inequality in who does care work and domestic labour — in the 'wider world' and in my personal life. I'm enraged about the lack of recognition and the disrespect often displayed for the (mostly) women and/or racialised people doing this work and how they, along with people who may need their care, are treated as expendable.
But there is hope: 2020 has demonstrated our interdependence and plenty of people have shown up to make sure people are cared for — friend or stranger. There has also been an outpouring of public appreciation. Over the peak of the pandemic here in Britain, Thursday evening's 'clap for carers' was a highlight for my nurse housemate and her three year old, who would bang on everyone's bedroom doors to remind us. Although many key workers loved it, for others the applause was hollow without concrete changens to their pay and working conditions.
This issue's Big Story explores care in its widest sense and its, often conveniently ignored, relationship with the wider economy. In the magazine we hear from people who are navigating this in a system which too often treats them with contempt.
Elsewhere in this edition, Stepanie Boyd reports from the Peruvian Amazon on how indigenous people, especially hard hit by the pandemic, are fighting for survival. Rahia Gupta makes the case for 'political blackness' and our food justice series questions the rise of food banks as a solution to world hunger.
And I know from my past as a Community Care magazine reader from 1998 to 2011 — ie, before it lost its interest for service user and unpaid carers' issues and focused more on the managerialism and privatisation agendas that Social Work Action Network (SWAN) opposes — and Green Party of England & Wales Spokesperson on Social Care between 2008 and 2011, of the enormous undervaluing of carers in the UK economy. One of the online articles that Community Care magazine website has not yet jetisoned is
I was also in contact with CarerWatch, an online network of family-based carers.
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| The Carer Watch Blog was last update 6 March 2017 — Testimony to the burnout carers experience under ever-increasing "lack of recognition and the disrespect often displayed for the (mostly) women and/or racialised people doing this work and how they, along with people who may need their care, are treated as expendable," as Amy Hall's New Internationalist editor's letter describes the issue |
Further, I would mention that Gingerbread One Parent Families website alerted me to the fact that 1/7 of single parent families were family carers of disabled children, or were themselves disabled, while the Tory Conference spin kept asserting that the benefits system was overloaded with feckless teenage parents. Gingerbread sources for those figures? Department for Work & Pensions data!
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| Gingerbread: Single Parents Facts & Figures |
Further, there is https://globalwomenstrike.net/
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| #CareIncomeNow! for all Caring Work for People & Planet |
New Internationalist magazine print edition, priced at £7.45, can be ordered through good newsagents.
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| New Internationalist: The Hidden Debt of Care — Covid-19 has pushed the world' caregivers to the limit and beyond. Amy Hall explains how their work continues to be undermined and undervalued |
Alan Wheatley
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