Nine words from a 1998 Manic Street Preachers number one sit at the top of this blog for a reason. They come originally from a Spanish Civil War propaganda poster, carried forward by a Welsh band still shaped by the disappearance of their lyricist Richey Edwards, who struggled with depression and vanished in 1995.
The phrase asks a question that doesn’t date: what are you tolerating, and what does that cost the people who come after you? That question runs through everything written here, from AI and social media manipulation to men’s mental health and the gap between being connected and actually showing up for someone.
I’m going to tell you something that might seem odd for a blog about AI, social media, small business marketing, mental health and men talking to each other on a Monday night (Andy’s Man Club).
Nine words make me cry.
Not always. Not every time. But often enough that I chose them as the first thing you see when you land here.
If you tolerate this your children will be next.
They’re not mine. They belong to the Manic Street Preachers, from a song released in 1998 that went to number one and has stayed in my head ever since.
But the words themselves are older than that.
They come from a propaganda poster produced during the Spanish Civil War, the late 1930s, printed under a photograph of a dead child with Nationalist bombers in the sky above.
The poster was a recruitment call. It was asking ordinary people to look at what was happening and decide whether they were going to do anything about it.
The Manic Street Preachers are Welsh. Welsh volunteers left their communities to join the International Brigades and fight Franco. Ordinary working men who looked at something happening far away and decided it was their problem too.
The lyric was written in Barcelona, inspired partly by George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and that original poster slogan. Nicky Wire, the band’s lyricist, said his favourite line from it is: “So if I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot fascists.”
An ordinary man.
An impossible situation.
A decision made anyway. NME
I’m not comparing anything happening today to the Spanish Civil War. That would be ridiculous and I’d deserve a pile-on. But the question those words ask hasn’t aged.
What are you going to put up with?
And
what happens to the people who come after you if you put up with it?
There’s something else about that song that matters to me, and it’s harder to say.
Richey Edwards, the band’s guitarist and lyricist, disappeared in February 1995. He had struggled with depression, self-harm, and anorexia as the band grew more famous. He was declared dead in absentia in 2008. His body was never found. “If You Tolerate This” came three years after he vanished. It was written by a band carrying an absence, trying to make sense of what they’d been through and what the world was doing around them.
That context doesn’t make the song more political.
It makes it more human.
Mental health sits close to the centre of everything I write here, whether I name it or not. I’m a facilitator at Andy’s Man Club, which means I sit with men every Monday who’ve been through things that would floor most people, and who mostly kept quiet about it for years because that’s what men do. The room works because people talk. Not because of an app, not because of an awareness campaign, not because somebody posted a ribbon. Because they showed up and opened their mouths.
And then I look at what’s happened over the past fifteen years. The research is not subtle. Social media platforms – the ones promising connection – have been consistently linked to rising rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. The algorithms that determine what you see are built to keep you scrolling, not to make you feel better. Attention is the product. Your attention, your children’s attention, your sense of reality. The manipulation isn’t a side effect. It’s the business model.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s just what the data says, and what the people who built these things have largely admitted when they thought nobody was listening.
So when I write about AI being used without scrutiny, or social media metrics that mean nothing, or the gap between being online and being connected, I’m not writing as a tech critic. I’m writing because I think it matters what we tolerate.
I think it matters what we hand to the next generation without stopping to ask whether it’s actually any good for them.
That question sits at the centre of almost everything I write here, whether I say so or not.
Now. The politics. Because I know what you’re thinking.
That song is left-wing. This blog is written by someone who sits somewhere in the middle, probably leaning right on some things and left on others depending on the day and the issue.
There’s an irony there and I’m not going to pretend there isn’t.
But I’m tired of the labels. I’m tired of the despatch box pantomime where two sides perform outrage at each other for an audience that’s already split down the middle.
My genuine belief, and I’ll stand behind it, is that if you put the leaders of any two opposing parties in a room with no cameras, no microphones, and nobody watching, they’d agree on more than they’d disagree on.
Maybe they’ll never agree about taxation and how the money gets spent, or about benefits, renewables and pot holes but, I bet, near the top of the list would be this:
we want children to have a safe, honest, decent future.
That’s not left.
That’s not right.
That’s just human.
So the words stay on the homepage. Not as a political statement. As a question. A standing question, aimed at anyone who reads here, including me.
What are you tolerating that you shouldn’t be?
And what does that cost the people who come after you?