JOHN PAPWORTH is the founder, former editor and now Editorial Board Member of Fourth World Review – 4WR. He’s also the editor of a local publication called Purton Today, – an “independent journal seeking to relate village affairs to the global crisis and the crisis to the village.”
Purton Today is distributed free-of-charge in the village of Purton, Wiltshire. Its aim is to promote “community empowerment in response to the many mass society crisis factors now overshadowing human life.”
Issue 32 has now been produced and its eight pages feature excellent articles by John Papworth, Adam Crosland and the late Sid Walker. Articles include The Christian Outlook, Crosland’s Comment, Purton High Street. There’s also a section devoted to letters and a review of a play – Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector – recently stages by the Purton Amateur Dramatic Society. Purton Today also supports local shops and businesses by hosting virtually a full page of adverts for goods and services.
Readers of Fourth World Review will know that the new editors – Wayne John Sturgeon and Graham Williamson – are keen to promote local publications like Purton Today. They see this as one way of instituting “a vast educational effort to resolve the multitudinous problems involved in the restructuring of power in society from the ground up rather than the top down.” Indeed the latest issue of 4WR (issue 154) states that “we need to produce hundreds – if not thousands – of local publications which’ll help popularise our ideas.”
The need to build such a local educational free press is also promoted in this issue of Purton Today:
“We aim to see every small community have its own regular Purton Today style newssheet. Helping to create a sane, neighbourly and democratic basis that can exert genuine influence over the giant forces now destroying the whole works. If we try to control the giants directly experience shows we only become like them. Small is not only beautiful, it is a condition of survival. So let us help change the world while we are part of it. When the curtain comes down it will be too late.”
To get hold of your FREE pdf copy of Purton Today, simply e-mail papworthjohn@yahoo.co.uk
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