Back Issues

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Established 1979
Free! Fortnightly! 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 February 7 (scan / txt); the next one is due out on February 21st.

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 early 1982 - of over 700. 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 the face of scant support from local anti-nuke organisations, the Women's Peace Camp at Greenham Common prepares for eviction proceedings; a hundred women march to protest about how Reading police treat rape victims, and make some pointed suggestions to the Chief Superintendent; a Rape Crisis Centre is to be set up; Reading's new Centre for the Unemployed opens; if word from the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign is anything to go by, the PLO's demands were positively mild and Israel really should have gone along with them; and a reader responds to praise for a rocket attack on the construction site of a French nuclear power plant. No greater a gesture than a protest march... the very blunt aggressiveness of it is symptomatic of the patriarchal society we are trying to change.