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 two weeks on or around the anniversary of their original publication. We're currently reissuing 1982; the latest issue is dated March 21st (scan / txt); the next one is due out on April 4th.

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 750. 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): Greenham Common hosts its first large Peace Festival; in the week that Thatcher declares war on crime we review the BBC's early fly-on-the wall "Police" series; more office blocks are to be built in the town centre (this hardly qualifies as news); for some reason the anarchists are compiling a list of empty properties; and the El Salvador Solidarity Campaign sets out its stall: in November 1980 four nuns in a rural part of the country were murdered by security forces which prompted the Carter administration to announce with much rhetoric about human rights - that it would suspend military aid to El Salvador. Military aid was soon quietly resumed after a few weeks when it was clear that the government could not survive against an ever growing opposition.