This tremendous track from the 1998 album This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours by the Manic Street Preachers originally started life as a B-side, with the band not intending for it to feature on the album that would achieve their first number one.

Thankfully for the Manics and the wider world, their A&R man at their record label, Rob Stringer, upon hearing the track being produced disagreed with their assertion and not only did he insist on it being on the album, but he also wanted it to be its leading track.

Just like how that album’s success to the band to a stratosphere they’d reached for the first time, this song did as well, becoming the first of two number one tracks that the band would enjoy in their illustrious career to date.

The other would come two years later at the turn of the millennium with ‘The Masses against the Classes’, a typically Manics polemic about class division. Alas, how the world has changed a quarter of a century later.

Anyway, back to If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next, which incidentally set a record of its own, being the longest song title to reach number one without any breaks, such as brackets.

The song itself has sometimes been misunderstood in its meaning, its context and its resonance, with far-right extremist groups such as the British National Party (BNP) and the English Defence League (EDL) using the track without authorisation in campaigns, only to be laughed at by the band and their fans.

Why? Because the song is actually the opposite, for it is a celebration of the battle of anti-fascists in the form of the International Brigades, an international alliance of predominantly left wing groups who fought against Francisco Franco and the fascist falangists in the Spanish Civil War.

The song title itself derives itself from a republican poster from that war, with a picture of a killed child with planes above its head, with the words ‘Madrid – the ‘military’ practice of the rebels above and ‘if you tolerate this your children will be next’ below.

Within the song itself are multiple references to different themes and events.

For example, the line ‘if I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot fascists’ comes from a famous quote from a Welsh volunteer for the anti-fascist fighters in the Spanish Civil War. The quote first surfaced in “Miners Against Fascism” by Hywel Francis.

The statement is made by a working-class Welsh miner volunteering to fight Spanish fascists. When asked why he was involved in a fight in a foreign land he reportedly replied: “I can already shoot rabbits, so I can shoot fascists, too.”

Likewise, ‘I’ve walked La Ramblas but not with real intent’ is a direct reference to ‘Homage to Catalonia’ by George Orwell. He remarks of how factions fighting Franco turned on each other in Barcelona, accusing their allies of being Fascist fronts.

To name two of many references.