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 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.