Emma Duncan

Jan 19, 2025 | collegiatetimes.com | Emma Duncan

Happy New Year Hokies! Thanks to social media, no one seems concerned about each other’s New Year’s resolutions going into 2025. Instead, it is all about what is in and out, that being one's dreams for the year and habits they would rather leave in 2024. Personally, New Year’s resolutions have never seemed sensible or applicable. They bring more negativity than hope, as “23% of people quit their resolution by the end of the first week, and 43% quit by the end of January,” according to .

Dec 5, 2024 | thetimes.com | Emma Duncan

Celebrating an achievement of the last Conservative government right now is a bit like pointing out that Gregg Wallace is a good television entertainer. It suggests you’re not reading the room. The new government may be a disappointment but that doesn’t mean its predecessor has been rehabilitated. As a former cabinet minister recently said to me: “Britain is so over the Tories.”Still, we need to acknowledge their limited achievements in order to build on them. The main one is in schools.

Nov 28, 2024 | thetimes.com | Emma Duncan

Today MPs must make one of the most consequential decisions of their political careers. The vote on assisted dying is quite different to those on taxing and spending or crime and punishment that MPs make in the normal business of parliamentary life. By giving the government a role in the choice of death over life, the bill would fundamentally change the relationship between the state and the people.

Nov 17, 2024 | thetimes.com | Emma Duncan

There was a discussion at supper with friends the other night about homeopathy, ayurveda, reiki healing and the whole gamut of hippyish health enthusiasms that normally go with antipathy to “western” (ie real) medicine. Normally I regard them with amused tolerance on the ground that if people want to buy non-medicines barely distinguishable from water or pay somebody to send them doses of essential life force across the cosmic network, the only damage they’re doing is to their wallet.

Nov 7, 2024 | thetimes.com | Emma Duncan

Donald Trump is king of the world. Nobody can hold a candle to his military or economic power. But there’s a bigger force looming over him that is beginning to flick its tail: debt. In the 1990s, debt was central to the Republican agenda. George Bush Sr raised taxes to eliminate it. Newt Gingrich seized control of Congress on a platform of fiscal rectitude. But voters objected to the discomfort balancing the budget caused and made it clear they preferred one marshmallow today to two tomorrow.