“At the end of the day, no argument in favour of exclusion can withstand what people see with their own eyes - that it is wrong to treat people they care about in a way that diminishes their personal choice.”

Alex Munter, the national spokesman for Canadians for Equal Marriage.

He spoke as the Canadian House of Commons passed a bill granting same-sex couples equal rights to those in traditional marriages.

Canada became the third country, behind Belgium and the Netherlands, to put the liberal fetish for “rights” and “personal choice” above the practical politics of promoting the known best medium for raising whole, contented human beings.

A few moments ago we cleared 500,000 hits since launch day.  That’s rather better, I feel, than an OK start for a new venture in a crowded market.  On behalf of everyone who labours here thank you for troubling to read us.  To our commentariat, many of whom I feel I have come to know as friends, a particularly warm thanks.  Your views, knowledge, good humour and articulacy are not wasted here.

Next stop six zeros.

Ain’t diversity wonderful?  Can’t see that happening in the Scottish Highlands in January.

Should British conservatives continue to give their allegiance to the British Conservative Party? Peter Hitchens has decided the answer is no. In a recent Spectator column, Hitchens deplores the failure of the Conservative Party to stand up to the “progressive consensus.”

Hitchens believes that the Conservative Party has been rendered ineffective, in part, by the existence of “contradictory wings”. He writes,

“The Tories’ position is hopeless. No man living could conceivably unify the party’s contradictory wings. Europhile or Eurosceptic, pro- or anti-marriage, market enthusiast or moralist – each of these quarrels is fundamental and cannot be settled by compromise. To refuse to resolve them is to ask to be dragged, by events beyond our control, into places we never decided to go.”

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Illustration from the Book of Kells, as suggested by Geoff.  This one is The Four Apostles.

It’s a small, overcrowded world. While browsing through back issues of the monthly newsletter of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), I came across a reference to an article by Colin Campbell (the eminence grise of the peak oil community) entitled ‘Petroleum and People’ and published in ‘Population and Environment’ v. 24/2 (November 2002). The former editor of ‘Population and Environment’ was Professor Kevin MacDonald, author of a trilogy on Judaism as a collective evolutionary strategy. 

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Opinion polls usually show that most people oppose high levels of foreign immigration. Yet John Ray frequently claims that it has popular consent. I presume that his logic runs as follows: such immigration is a public policy, we live in democracies in which the majority rules, therefore such immigration must have majority support.

I think John’s fault is to accept the second part of this argument: that in a democracy there is majority rule. I used to accept this idea too, but I came to realise that this is not really a feature of modern democracy. In modern Western democracies the majority is allowed to determine every few years which party of an established political class will rule. And that is where majority rule stops.

Now, before John replies that I cut a lonely figure in making such an argument, let me quote some support for this view. In the June Spectator there’s a review by Jonathan Sumption of a book Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy by John Dunn.

It is Jonathan Sumption’s view that “modern democracies might be described as oligarchies tempered by elections” in which a barrier to popular power is created “by vesting the power of decision in an elected political class united by a body of shared values often at odds with popular sentiment.”

Mr Sumption writes that democracy “confers no rights on the electorate apart from the right to dismiss the oligarchy of the moment every few years, and replace it by another, generally of much the same kind.”

These claims, I think, are not far off the mark. They explain why a liberal political class has been able to advance its agenda despite the presence of a largely conservative electorate.

Steve Edwards, an occasional visitor to this site, has come up with a brilliant new Australian flag design.

(You need to know Paul Keating to really get this one.)