Yma O Hyd, but we don’t need songs of defeat

Yma O Hyd singer Daffyd Iwan (Picture: rhysllwyd on Flickr)

You can understand why Welsh football fans adopted the song Yma O Hyd (We’re Still Here) as their anthem. It’s a cry of defiance, but from a place of deep defeat.

But please don’t let it be the defining voice of the 2022 strikes. We need tunes of victory, not of being pummelled.

Yma O Hyd is a song of barely-remembered heroes and crushing setbacks with the only consolation that “Despite everyone and everything, we are still here”. We might be flattened, steam-rollered, flayed and beaten. But we’ll keep popping up.

Dafydd Iwan—whose music I like—wrote it in the 1980s as Margaret Thatcher’s Tories began the process of rolling over trade unions and the welfare state.

He was demoralised after repeated imprisonment for his Welsh language activism, and problems in his personal life. And people had voted against Welsh devolution, let alone independence.

It’s got some great lines, recalling the poetry of Idris Davies, that certain union leaders might do well to remember. “Let the tears of the faint-hearted flow, and the servile lick the floor.”

But it does slide seamlessly into a terrible British tradition—celebrate when you lost. What’s the biggest British trade union festival? It’s recalling the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

This was deliberately created and memorialised in the 1930s specifically after the defeat of the 1926 general strike and the betrayal of Ramsay MacDonald. So I’d rather sing something like On Est La (we’re here)—the song of the French Yellow Vests. 

It has the same stickability as Yma O Hyd but from the hope of winning—“We are here, We are here, Even if Macron does not want it, we are here. For the honour of the workers, For a better world, Even if Macron does not want it, here we are!”

Give us victories, not more glorious defeats.

• The words to the songs featured here are in Welsh or French but are translated into English