I was swiping through TikTok when the headline appeared. A Telegraph column asking whether the unemployed should lose the right to vote. (“Way of the World” by Michael Deacon ,19 May 2026) I didn’t blink. I didn’t gasp. I felt the familiar drop in my stomach. The quiet recognition. The sense that something dark had shifted again yet nothing in me was surprised. When a society has spent centuries deciding who counts it doesn’t need to shout when it moves the line. It only needs to whisper. The headline was framed as satire. It didn’t feel like satire. It felt like a mask slipping. A reminder that cruelty becomes normal long before it becomes policy. A reminder that the ground has been softening for years. Beneath the Telegraph’s satire lies a worldview that treats human worth as a function of economic productivity, and imagines whole categories of people; disabled people, carers, the ill, the unemployed, anyone whose life has been interrupted by circumstance; as morally suspect citizens...
For three centuries Switzerland has been the quiet witness at the edge of Europe’s storms. It was born from the wreckage of the Thirty Years War and it learned early that survival required silence. Through Napoleon’s march, through the industrial killing fields of the First World War, through the nuclear standoff of the Cold War, Switzerland held its line. It guarded the wounded. It hosted the Geneva Conventions. It kept the channels open when enemies refused to speak. It behaved, in its own way, like one of Hemingway’s mountain sentinels, watching the world’s violence from a cold height, refusing to be drawn into the madness below. That long silence ended this month. The Swiss Federal Council has now said aloud what it once only whispered. In an interview with SonntagsZeitung, Defence Minister Martin Pfister stated with clinical clarity that “the Federal Council is of the opinion that the attack on Iran constitutes a violation of international law.” He went further, saying that “the A...