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 1985; the latest issue is dated July 7th (scan / txt); the next one is due out on the 21st.

Red Rag, or Reading's only newspaper, had a noble tradition of misspelling, mixed metaphors, wrong facts, confused political judgements and a readership 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? But in five and a half years it had never sold a single copy.

In this issue (scan / txt): the Henley Regatta draws to a close and with it maybe also a debate lifted straight from the Ladybird Book of Cliche Politics; £700 has been raised for the Free Festival to celebrate 20 years of the Reading Anarchist Group; Japan intends to ignore the moratorium on whaling that seemed so certain in back in 1982; we struggle with a politically correct spelling for "boycott"; and someone's got it in for Ragwort.