A horde of immigrant fish is flooding into our rivers, attacking and eating the native British inhabitants. Even those fish not eaten are being crowded out, and will soon be a minority in their own rivers ... Under water, as on land, immigration has proved a disaster. But at least the officials responsible for the water immigration have admitted their mistake. And are taking action to win back British rivers for British fish.

Anonymous, "Catch It and Kill It!", The Flag, No. 63, May/June 1992.

Might I suggest that in order to generate sufficient interest in the quantity and quality of public health care provision that all citizens should be prohibited from excercising a right of exit (by the purchase of private provision) and that, in the absence of any acceptable clinical reasons for prioritisation, a commitment to equity would best be served by ensuring that poorer members of the community were accorded priority over those who had enjoyed a more prosperous existence (a ruling which might serve to encourage the redistributive zeal of the better off).

Robert Page, "Letter", The Guardian, 1 May, 1992.

... the West sadly continues to be driven by an overriding need for political control, and by their deep fear of a Black planet. They have unfortunately not grown beyond their crude ideological belief that there is only one way to survive: to control, kill and destroy.

Editorial Collective, Introduction to feature article, Spare Rib, No. 223, May 1991.

Socialism, to me, cannot be socialism without being popular and, in many senses, unremarkable.

Bryan Gould, "What's Left of the Left?", New Statesman, 3 May, 1991.

... this is the level of hopelessness our leaders have encouraged for more than a decade: social programmes cause poverty, they have told us. Racism is normal and genteel. The 1960s war on poverty failed, as must any attempt to smooth the jagged inequalities of race and class. Nothing can be done, in other words. Reach for the gun.

Barbara Ehrenreich, "The New Arms Race That Will Blow America Apart", The Guardian, 23 May, 1992.

To stop [the British National Party] having any foothold in Rochdale we need to physically smash them time and time again preventing them from polluting our streets, dirtying our terraces and infecting our pubs with their anti-working class racist garbage through fear of strong local resistance.

Anonymous, "Rochdale - Fascists Be Warned!", Fighting Talk: Journal of Anti-Fascist Action, No. 2, Spring 1992, p. 5.

The tragedy of the English is that they cannot transcend their profoundly individualistic past as caricatured over the last decade by Baroness Thatcher .... [Consider] the words of D. H. Lawrence: "Men are free when they are in a living homeland not when they are straying or breaking away ... Men are free when they belong to a living organic, believing community active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealised purpose."

The essence of a post-industrial society is not freedom from relation but freedom through organised relation. So there's no either-or dilemma and no need to strike some mythical compromise or balance.

T. D. Hunter, "Letter: The Sadly Individualistic English", The Guardian, 7 July, 1992.

Africa was once a matriarchal society. Women held the most important roles - important aspects of society were in their hands. But that has all been destroyed by Colonialism and lmperialism ... I understand that there is a spirit of Africa that you turn to - sometimes I go home to that soulful vision of Africa.

Interview with Rono Tse & Michael Franti, "Putting the File on This State of Denial: The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy", Spare Rib, July 1992, p. 27.

On June 14, the Gadhafi Human Rights Award was given to the struggle against AIDS in Africa. It was presented to the peoples of Africa at a ceremony in Tripoli which was attended by people from all over the World despite the current illegal air embargo against Libya.

The Award is based on the Green Charter of Human Rights, drafted by the People's Congresses throughout Libya, and ratified on June 12, 1988 by the Libyan General People's Congress. The Charter holds that a person's life and its preservation are among the most important and sacred rights, and that it is a duty to defend and protect these from all that would threaten them.

Marcel Fakhry, "Libya: Gadhafi Human Rights Award Given to the Fight Against AIDS in Africa", Spare Rib, July 1992, p. 46.

Increasing credence is being given to the hypothesis that HIV and AIDS are the product of biological/genetic experiments, conducted in US government laboratories. While some claim that its creation may have been a mistake, there is considerable evidence that the virus was consciously developed by the US to use as biological/ genetic warfare against other nations ... Zear Miles, an African American industrial engineer who has extensively studied the origins and development of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, also believes the virus was created as germ warfare, to be used against the African American population. He cites US National Security Council Memorandum 46, dated 1978, which called for a possible way to gauge and control the impact of the growing Black movement. Later called the King Alfred plan, the scheme called for the extinction of African Americans by the year 2000 with an AIDS-like virus.

Marcel Fakhry, Ibid, p. 47.

Lynsey de Paul presents this 50-minute minute programme, comprising self-defence advice and yell-and-kick success stories, which will probably split the audience right down the middle - since even the most reconstructed kind of bloke responds to women's justifiable fear of attack as if it is stupid and ridiculous.

L. T., "TV Preview", The Times, 7 August, 1992.

... we all live and grew up in a deeply racist society. All white people are completely saturated wuth racist conditioning, no matter how liberal they may try to appear.

However, (speaking now to white people), your racism is not you. You don't need to feel guilty about having it, but you do need to own up to it and change it. Don't try to pretend it isn't there, because that never fooled us for a minute.

Karl Lam, "Letter: Owning Up to Racism", The Guardian, 11 August, 1992.

White women `stars' like Madonna, Sandra Bernhard and many others publicly name their interest in, and appropriation of, black culture as yet another sign of their radical chic. Intimacy with that `nasty' blackness good white girls stay away from is what they seek. To white and other non-black consumers, this gives them a special flavor, an added spice. After all, it is a very recent historical phenomenon for any white girl to be able to get some mileage out of flaunting her fascination and envy of blackness. The thing about envy is that it is always ready to destroy, erase, take over, and consume the desired object. That's exactly what Madonna attempts to do when she appropriates and commodifies aspects of black culture ...

For masses of black women, the political reality that underlies Madonna's and our recognition that this is a society where `blondes' not only 'have more fun', but where they are more likely to succeed in any endeavor, is white supremacy and racism. We cannot see Madonna's change in hair color as being merely a question of aesthetic choice. I agree with Julie Burchill in her critical work Girls on Film, when she reminds us: "What does it say about racial purity that the best blondes have all been brunettes (Harlow, Monroe, Bardot)? I think it says that we are not as white as we think. I think it says that Pure is a Bore." I also know that it is the expressed desire of the non-blonde Other for those characteristics that are seen as the quintessential markers of racial aesthetic superiority that perpetuate and uphold white supremacy. In this sense Madonna has much in common with the masses of black women who suffer from internalized racism and are forever terrorized by a standard of beauty they feel they can never truly embody ...

... when the chips are down, the image Madonna most exploits is that of the quintessential 'white girl'. To maintain that image she must always position herself as an outsider in relation to black culture. It is that position of outsider that enables her to colonize and appropriate black experience for her own opportunistic ends, even as she attempts to mask her acts of racist aggression as affirmation. And no other group sees that as clearly as black females in this society. For we have always known that the socially constructed image of innocent white womanhood relies on the continued production of the racist/sexist sexual myth that black women are not innocent and never can be. Since we are coded always as `fallen' women in the racist culture iconography, we can never, as can Madonna, publically `work' the image of ourselves as innocent female daring to be bad. Mainstreamculture always reads the black female body as a sign of sexual experience. In part, many black women who are disgusted by Madonna's flaunting of sexual experience, are enraged because the very image of sexual agency that she is able to project, and affirm with material gain, has been the stick this society has used to justify its continued beating and assault on the black female body ...

Eager to see the documentary "Truth or Dare" because it promised to focus on Madonna's transgressive sexual persona, which I find interesting, I was angered by her visual representation of her domination over not white men (certainly not over Warren Beatty or Alek Keshishian), but over people of color and white working-class women. I was too angered by this to appreciate other aspects of the film I might have enjoyed. In "Truth or Dare" Madonna clearly revealed that she can only think of exerting power along very traditional, white supremacist, capitalistic, patriarchal lines. That she made people who were dependent on her for their immediate livelihood submit to her will, was neither charming nor seductive to me or the other black folks that I spoke with who saw the film. We thought it tragically ironic that Madonna would choose as her dance partner a black male with dyed blonde hair. Perhaps had he appeared less like a white-identified black male consumed by `blonde ambition' he might have upstaged her. Instead he was positioned as a mirror, into which Madonna and her audience could look and see only a reflection of herself and the worship of `whiteness' she embodies - that white supremacist culture wants everyone to embody.

Bell Hooks, "Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister: Bell Hooks on Madonna", Spare Rib, No. 237, August/September, 1992, pp. 26, 27, 28-29.

After reading the July issue of Spare Rib I was very disturbed at the fact that you had dedicated five pages to two male artists ... As a women's magazine [Spare Rib] should be women only space ... There are many Black women artists and many Black lesbian artists who need promotion, attention, recognition. Their words of Black analysis on race, class, homophobia, ableism and sexism need to be heard. You are ignoring this by giving two men five pages of this valuable space, which could have been given to a Black lesbian writer, for instance ... It should be a standard practice of any anti-racist women's magazine to include Black lesbians in every issue. Another area where the [Spare Rib] Collective seems ignorant is around the issue of Black disabled women generally and Black disabled lesbians in particular.

Rajo Ashra Saira, "Letter", Spare Rib, No. 238, October/November, 1992, p. 6.

It's time for Europeans to stop the hideous and intellectually dishonest practise of insisting that they are equipped to write about everything. They are not - and never can be - experts on other cultures and peoples, as they often claim to be.

Editorial Collective, "Reply", Spare Rib, No. 238, p. 5.