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 1986; the latest issue is dated November 18th (scan / txt); the next one is due out on December 2nd.

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): Secretary of State for Education Ken Baker visits Bulmershe College but doesn't care to meet with any of the students; said students then arrange a protest against Tory education cuts and the proposed introduction of a mixed grants/loan system which would leave them with massive debts at the end of their courses; four students are picked out of the crowd and arrested; and Reading's less objective papers shout "non-student activists", "Anarchists" and "riot". Campaigns in Reading and London demand justice in the cases of Gurdip Kaur and Balwant Kaur, both murdered by their husbands; the 25th anniversary of the Sandinistas is celebrated; why not to drive to an action in a vehicle with a faulty tyre and no tax disk; and if Jim, Heather and Shea P. - last heard of somewhere in Scotland - happen to be reading this then George needs to contact you about the battle of the beanfield.