RED RAG (cover illustration)

Back Issues

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Established 1979
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These are the back issues of Red Rag. They'll be posted here every (usually) two weeks on or around the anniversary of their original publication. We're currently reissuing 1987; the latest issue is dated April 21st (scan / txt); the next one is due out on May 5th.

Red Rag, or Reading's only newspaper, had a noble tradition of misspelling, mixed metaphors, wrong facts, confused political judgements and a readership in its heyday of 4000. It printed practically everything it got sent ("except poetry and party political broadcasts, provided it isn't racist, sexist, militarist or otherwise supportive of oppression"). It aimed to provide a decent alternative coverage of local news and issues from a radical non-aligned position; to promote subversive and creative initiatives; to provide a forum for unorthodox views; to allow some sort of co-existence between a huge variety of interests. An indispensible source of local information? a forum for the self-indulgent and self-important? a continuous experiment in collective, de-centralised organisation? Who knew? In its first seven years it never sold a single copy; but now after much soul-searching a price had been put on the Rag's head...

In this issue (scan / txt): a spate of suicides hits defence trade computer experts in the Reading area; a new pressure group encourages councils to enforce the laws concerning estate agents boards advertising houses for sale; the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency has kept secret more than 250 reports of breakdowns at nuclear power stations; it takes twelve people to hold a riot, three for violent disorder, but only one for affray; along with Yuppies, Young Upwardly Mobile Persons and Dinkies, Dual Income No Kids there are now Yummies, the Young Upwardly Mobile Marxists; and Caversham has a plague of rhinoceroses.