Richard D North.

It is just possible that Philip Blond and the Red Toryism of his ResPublica are the very fig-leaf a true-blue Conservative Party needs. It may be that David Cameron, beyond his bland rebranding of the Tories, is thinking along these lines.... Read more...

Lord Lawson and Benny Peiser are bonny climate change policy warriors but they have perhaps made a strategic error in lining-up climate (or AGW) deniers for their new think-tank. Read more...

The battle lines in the climate change wars are not quite where I had thought they were. Read more...

In the run-up to the Copenhagen update of the Kyoto process, the biggest climate change deniers are those who can't or won't see that most of the rhetoric about what we "must" do is so  much hot air. What we ought to do is another matter. Read more...

Body-counts and other metrics about casualties aren't everything by a long shot, but we need to find ways to think about the computable "costs of war". That will contribute to an assessment of its moral dimensions. So far, I'm finding the numbers hard to find, let alone think about. Read more...

The British military tradition is real, but it is up for grabs. Here are some thoughts about modern trends. Read more...

Whether or not any war is "worthwhile" is never a pretty discussion. But it may be worth trying out some quite tough thinking, so here goes. I conclude (to my own surpirse) that the most important single factor is the military's enthusiasm. Read more...

I appeared as a witness at a World Congress of Faiths "Moral Maze" before a small audience in Southwark Cathedral last night. Surprise, surprise I defended capitalism against a range of (mostly religious) critics. Read more...

I am keen to develop some lines of argument about the Military Covenant. I suspect that the relationship between society and the military is going to change fundamentally. It may get tougher for the military. Read more...

[The following blog - written in 2009 - still represents my views, but please also see a later blog of mine and its useful link to an Alzheimer's Society position paper on Contented Dementia, which I think states a very similar opinion but with far more authority. RDN, 30 July 2013] Oliver James has written some silly and poorly-argued books and it would have been nice if Contented Dementia, his new offering, was an exception. It isn't. Read more...