I've never seen a papersale in Reading.
You won't have done, when we moved to reading in 1992, there was a small group of older, less active members. I restarted paper sales, and managed to pick up a few new people and tried various things to gain a wider audience, including a Friday night sale outside the railway station, but nothing really worked until the start of the SWPs involvement in the socialist alliance. We were able to draw to us the remnants of the much larger old slp branch as well as a number of others, though Julie watersons wizard wheeze of asking me to stand as candidate soured relations with the sp. ( and this was the difference in the SA period, suddenly relationships with others socialists mattered).
The election broke the branch, but we picked up the pieces and tried to carry on, then I was victimised at work and lost my job, the lack of support I received from the party, which was busy denigrating the SA experience was especially noticeable in comparison with the campaign in defence of Greg tucker which beat attempts of management to victimise him.
With me withdrawn the branch collapsed, and only began to revive with the march to war.
I reapplied myself, somewhat less enthusiastically, and we achieved some stuff, most noticeably the anti war march through reading on 31st October 2002-( the swpers at the stw head office really did not want to allow us a Halloween against the war march, as this would 'upset the Christians')
There were two triggers which decided me in leaving the SWP, the first was the arrival of a new comrade, who was a Egyptian doctor, and who immediately became the conduit for all information from the centre, and was it seemed seen as leader of the branch, even though he wouldn't do paper sales nor any public activity.
The second was the arrival of John Rees at our Halloween protest, after the parade of vicars and liberal peaceniks, having Rees on the speakers list was a coup for the doctor, and I looked forward to having the revolutionary position laid out. However, Rees proceeded to give a banal ' if we all stand together the government have to stop the war' liberal guff.
When the Egyptian doctor then turned up at a reading anti war group meeting declaring himself to be 'Berkshire Stop the War' an entirely fictitious group, to forbid us from standing candidates in the local elections.
He was politely ignored by the group, and when he attempted to impose party discipline on me was less politely rebuffed.
Since then I have known of only three paper sales in reading, two outside the station on a Friday night, and one, bizarrely, outside Riley's pool hall on the Oxford road. The purpose of this I have never been able to establish, though the hall has since closed down and is being turned into a church.
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