Back Issues

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• Red Rag

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 July 11th (scan / txt); the next one is due out on the 25th.

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): tempers flare when the "Cosmic Counter Cruise Freedom Festival" descends on Greenham Common; under the banner of "Homes not Offices" Reading Anarchists call a meeting to plan direct action on "homelessness" (i.e. squatting); the European Court of Justice rules that Britain is failing to enforce laws on equal pay for men and women; Showaddywaddy headline at the Hexagon; and a challenge to the Rag's new appearance: If the invention of the printing press inaugurated the bourgeois era, the time is at hand for its repeal by the mimeograph, the only fitting, the unobtrusive means of dissemination.