The Bones of Britain

This poem is a fantastical hyperbole, a picture of grim dystopian exploitation and engineering, underlain with an alternative vision where the people make sure work is them-shaped, not the other way around in a cult of work - the people in all our diversity including that precipitated by colonialism, and in disability, neurodivergence and those not built for the worst sides of workplaces (hint: nobody is) (also work and indeed schooling is disabling) ; a vision where we don't let 'them' grind us down to dust, and make this place for us. Not that I was actually thinking about it (consciously at least) but Les Mis meets Greatest Showman with some actual socialism or anarchy - cheesy as it sounds. A cooperative vision of the future. Albeit hidden behind a lot of warningly grandiose sarcasm and references to roman concrete, calcium carbonate from shells (watched a short on making concrete recently), bones, chalky Dover limestone, and with concrete cancer and Bradford interchange not quite mentioned.
www.theguardia...
This was sparked by Polly Toynbee's recent optimistic article about how we won't follow Europe's lurch to the right holding onto "immigration-realism" despite Farage and Sunak - well, not so much that but the striking line "Policy to get those more than 2.5 million sick people cured and into work..." which misses out fundamentals of realism and of who society is for (forget the safety net!?), citing the problematic sick in order to displace the threat and to hold onto this creed, this currently politically shared and repeated line of misanthropic messianic rhetoric - policy pretending to be messianic at least, an apotheosis of "grown-up" statesmanship, a dystopian theocracy that way. As if to treat people as mere economic units and also to throw the workers of the world, including disabled people and everything under the bus for the "realism" of the cult of work and pretend nothing is broken but the people!?
Here is a very different article from Toynbee in 2005: www.theguardia...
Anyway this started to form into a poem before fully forming any thoughts and rather than addressing Toynbee or warmed up to doing so I was addressing wider issues and addressing the people of the UK (we all get sick, most of us become disabled at some point, ending up with multiple diagnoses - which is why disableism is such a shame, and self-defeating - the ideal is how to live a good life anyway; and thankfully we're not all bent over with arthritis and missing fingers and dead at 40, we don't want a return to Victorian diseases of the working poor, we want something else).