Back Issues

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Established 1979
Free! Three weekly! Fun!

These are the back issues of Red Rag. They'll be posted here every two weeks on or around the anniversary of their original publication. We're currently reissuing 1982; the latest issue is dated August 15th (scan / txt); the next one is due out on September 5th.

Red Rag, or Reading's only newspaper, had a noble tradition of misspelling, mixed metaphors, wrong facts, confused political judgements and a dedicated readership by now of over 800. It aimed to publicise and encourage a wide spectrum of subversion and culture in Reading; it kept people in touch with an events diary which spanned the activities of groups as diverse as organic gardeners and anarchists, anti-nuclear activists and civic planners, wild-eyed liberals and woolly communists; it contained news and views and details of things to do in and around Reading which the local press couldn't or wouldn't touch. And it was free.

In this issue (scan / txt): in Amsterdam last week Alan Reeve, an ex Broadmoor patient, was recaptured after a year of 'freedom'. On Friday his friend Pat Ford walked into an Amsterdam police station with a lawyer. The nonsense on the right was some of what the Daily Star wrote on the subject. Red Rag's account is on page 2. Meanwhile, for most patients in Britain's mental hospitals, life goes on as normal. Normal for them, though, is humiliating and dehumanising treatment. The second part of our report on life in a nearby hospital, page 3.