Amol Rajan

speaker

3,997 appearances 23 recordings 6 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Amol Rajan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 12.

Appearances

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Radical · Last Call for the Local: Are Old Pubs the Solution to Modern Crises? (Oisín Rogers) · 25 Jun 2026 podcast

Call me old. matched

No, no, no. matched

When you go back 35 years and I think about the pubs that you would have landed in in London in the early 90s, they smelled different. matched

And they smelled different because people smoked. matched

And I'd be really interested in your analysis of whether or not the smoking ban was this, because I remember the debate around it. matched

People say it's going to kill the pubs. matched

What has the smoking ban done to pubs and has it been a net loss of damage? matched

You stank, you go there and you come out and you stink of it. matched

I mean, we think about this. matched

I don't want to make this about UK politics, but you think a lot about the trade-offs between short-term pain and long-term gain. matched

You know, there's quite a lot of the hardest things that you've got to do in this country would involve really annoying some people in the short term and there being a shock. matched

And, you know, the graph of the kind of, you know, the commercial outputs are dipping very badly and go violently into the red before it sort of comes back. matched

Smoking ban is a very good example of that, because as you say, short term. matched

A lot of people were very upset about it, but long term, you know, 20 years, I don't know how many years on it is, you're happy with the smoking ban. matched

You wouldn't reverse it and say people should be allowed to smoke in pubs. matched

Story of my life, boss. matched

What about the drinking age? matched

Rufus has just whispered to me, and it's a great privilege of doing this job that you have clever people tell you things, that in Germany you can drink wine and beer, I think within that sort of environment, from the age of 16. matched

It's not going to be transformational. matched

I had this really remarkable experience way back when. matched

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