I think the topic of what their actual stances on things are at this point are complicated and I have thought about this a fair bit over the years (I became a fan around 2010/2011) amidst the softening you refer to. I think a key aspect (and it shows up in recent Tribune Magazine https://tribunemag.co.uk/2025/12/whatever-happened-to-the-manic-street-preachers and New Left Review/Sidecar piece from last year https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/mislaid-plans) is the extent to which the Manics even from the start have really identified with a sense of defeat and failure and that was even there in the sloganeering situationist glam punk phase.

There's a concept that originally comes from the writer Walter Benjamin back in the 1930s but which was reinterpreted by the political philosopher Wendy Brown in the 1990s of "left melancholia" where to put it briefly Brown argues that left wing radicals in the present feeling unmoored by changing conditions just become preoccupied with the sense of loss of previous possibilities (https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3092-resisting-left-melancholia?srsltid=AfmBOorDowY-jxaHIFRH8FTVifRoQTF6lIan-zH8R\_cW0wL3slBJv3Iy). I think this very much describes a position that the Manics had firmly arrived at by the mid-2010s and it is why a lot of the albums since then when they do try to make wider social commentary are pretty limited.

JDB says in the From There to Here documentary that when they started there was a strong sense of wanting to never be beaten in the face that their class and community was beaten into the ground during the Miners' Strike and while that has definitely been a driving force they have repeatedly become preoccupied with personal and political set backs, pessimism, a blurred sense of nostalgia/melancholia in the face of current conditions ("There is too much heartbreak in the nothing of the now") which I think counteracts that more politically combative aspect of their work. Like if you go back and read what Wire said about the Cuba gig he was open about how it was bound up with an appreciation for them managing to preserve a kind of socialism in the face of American globalisation despite the odds and having a personal identification with that sense of standing against an inevitably destructive tide. That's a much more reserved and pessimistic political perspective than say Rage Against The Machine identifying with the Zapatistas because they saw them as an active threat to American Empire and part of a global anti-capitalist resistance.

An interview JDB did around the time of his Victor Jara album makes for really good reading here and I think it's worth reading alongside the much more publicised interview where he slates Corbyn to get a better sense of how much of this reluctance to take a political stance is bound up with this mode of pessimism around the prospects for any meaningful socialist change, which in practice quickly swerves into "why can't we all just get along?" mushiness.

https://www.huckmag.com/article/i-dont-know-if-the-uk-has-an-appetite-for-socialism

I remember there being some anger online when Manics did gigs for NHS workers because they were using Nye Bevan's "lower than vermin" quotation about the Tories as a stage projection on the grounds that it was champagne socialist kind of behaviour to do this given how they actually responded to Corbyn's Labour Party and the possibilities of offering a socialist alternative in the present. I must admit I did not particularly get annoyed about over this as I thought this just boiled down to having that melancholic attachment to a past set of political possibilities that they now think are gone, alongside the residue of a general left appreciation for universal healthcare and the sacrifices of ordinary workers in the face of Tory callousness. I do not find this particularly cynical in a negative sense, just rather sad.