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

Issues like matched

Loneliness, like isolation, like the collapse of social capital and the crisis of community. matched

The fact that we need third spaces, places that are not the family home, they're not the workplace, but something in between. matched

And he thinks that pubs need more protection from the government, both on tax and in terms of protecting their heritage. matched

He's got that specific idea about so-called golden bricks or finding some sort of way in a planning system to recognise the heritage of these buildings. matched

And he wants the government to be radical. matched

He wants government to cut VAT. matched

He says if you cut VAT from 20% to 10% or even further, that would pay for itself because you get more people working and pubs creating more economic value. matched

He also wants this radical new legislation that makes it more difficult for pubs matched

to be sold off just because it might be more economically viable to treat them as commercial offices, for instance, rather than as these wonderful pubs. matched

And he argues that we should value pubs in a way that can't be measured in money alone. matched

But also really interestingly, he does acknowledge these underlying cultural trends. matched

You can often split the trends that we talk about on this podcast between economic forces or commercial forces on the one hand and cultural forces on the other. matched

And there are just these deep cultural forces that are affecting the future viability of many pubs. matched

So people are just drinking less. matched

Young people consume less alcohol in general terms overall than older people. matched

It's also the case that supermarkets are selling alcohol for much cheaper than they used to. matched

And frankly, if that means that some pubs are unable to survive in the Darwinian race that is modern commerce, O'Sheen Rogers, a bit like James May, who I quoted in that conversation yesterday, matched

just thinks that the good ones will survive, the bad ones will fall away. matched

And the overarching message, if he were to sum it up, is that if pubs want to keep their doors open, if they want to thrive morally and commercially, they need to start with the fundamentals. matched

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