Poet and photographer Paul Steffan Jones developed an abhorrence of social injustice not by taking to the roads of London or cleaning in the kitchens of Paris, but by working for the Department of Social Security in a Job Centre Plus, where, against the unwritten rules in operation there, he actually proactively assisted his clients to fill out the necessary forms to make successful claims. This wilful independence of spirit and a burning anger against establishment mores stokes his poetry and his photography.

My Fake News

Our questionable democracy

in its heartless heartland

its chasms of inequality

and spasms of broken promises

uneven justice that isn’t even justice

the cause of the proliferation of foodbanks

denied by millionaire cabinets

and their empty debate podia

the denial of climate disaster

and the Holocaust

policies based on alternative facts

wars waged on non-existing evidence

we allow our lives and those of our children

and the health of the earth and its creatures

to be skewed and prostituted by dark money

and unaccountable lobby groups

those so-called Islamic States

that so-called Tommy Robinson

you couldn’t make it up

but someone did

my fake news

Liars Incorporated

shamelessness is the new virtue to signal

and here comes my deepfake

wonder what I will end up looking like