John Osmond suggests that the current controversies surrounding Tom Jones’s 1960s hit song betray an atavistic Welsh culture of defeat:
Delilah has always been notorious in mythology, emblematic of traitorous tempters. Now she is becoming notorious in contemporary Welsh politics.
In the book of Judges, in the Bible, it is recorded that Samson loved Delilah, she betrayed him, and, what is worse, she did it for money. Samson became Delilah’s victim. It is significant, therefore that in the famous, perhaps infamous Tom Jones’s 1968 hit Delilah, she herself is made the victim.
She is a ‘whore’ who becomes the victim when knifed by an aggrieved lover:
I saw the light on the night that I passed by her window
I saw the flickering shadows of love on her blind
She was my woman
As she deceived me I watched and went out of my mind
My, my, my, Delilah
Why, why, why, Delilah
I could see that girl was no good for me
But I was lost like a slave that no man could free
At break of day when that man drove away, I was waiting
I cross the street to her house and she opened the door
She stood there laughing
I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more
My, my, my Delilah
Why, why, why Delilah
So before they come to break down the door
Forgive me Delilah I just couldn’t take any more
She stood there laughing
I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more
My, my, my, Delilah
Why, why, why, Delilah
So before they come to break down the door
Forgive me Delilah I just couldn’t take any more
Forgive me Delilah I just couldn’t take any more
Tom Jones’s Delilah has achieved notoriety twice in Wales in recent weeks. On 21 March, the day of the Wales-Ireland game, culmination of the Six Nations championship, Plaid Cymru’s Helen Mary Jones went on Radio 4’s Today programme to complain that the song, with its themes of prostitution and violence, was an inappropriate anthem to be sung from the rugby terraces.
Then last week Labour MEP Eluned Morgan used the hit theme on her controversial video, denouncing Tories and Plaid, but in her own words: “Why, why, why vote Tory?” and “Why, why, why vote Plaidi?”
What is it about this tune, and the lyrics, that so appeals to the Welsh psyche? Can it be something to do with a Welsh obsession with defeat and victimhood? Over generations this has been an abiding characteristic of Welsh society and politics. Unlike the Scots, for instance, we have no memories of successful wars of independence and the experience of institution-building that ensued. Instead, we have memories of the death of Llywelyn ap Grufudd on 1 December 1282 and the collapse of the embryonic Welsh state which he created.
Since then, what have been thought of as distinctive Welsh institutions or impulses, such as Methodism or trade unionism, often brought into Wales and inflected with an intense passion, have in fact been much more complex. As Raymond Williams so perceptively observed in his 1985 essay Wales and England, “Unless we relate [this phenomenon], at every point, to the long experience of defeat and subordination, we project a quite false essential autonomy.”
There have broadly been two Welsh responses to this culture of defeat. One has been resistance, but a resistance that never quite succeeds. The mythology around Owain Glyndŵr exercises its power just because his campaign was essentially one of resistance, and one that ultimately failed, though Owain himself was never decisively defeated. He just disappeared.
The second response has been what we feel to be the Welsh characteristics of warmth and intimacy, concern for the underdog, egalitarian values and the socialism arising out of Methodism – all characteristics associated with the iconic 20th Century politician Aneurin Bevan.
So can it be just coincidence that Eluned Morgan’s and Peter Hain’s new website is named directly after these two legendary figures?
How else can we explain what seems, on the surface at least, such a crass attempt on the website to demonise opponents? Remember this happened once before, but last time it was the other way round. In the run-up to the 1997 general election, when defeat stared the Tories in the eyes, they put up billboards around the country representing Tony Blair with a distorted grin, looking like the devil incarnate. Now on its new website, Welsh Labour depict Welsh Tory leader Nick Bourne as Dracula, with vampire teeth jutting from his mouth. Can it be that it is now Labour’s turn to be staring into the eyes of defeat at the forthcoming European, Westminster and Assembly elections – all due to take place over the next two years?
It’s time Welsh politics moved on. Now we have our own home-growing institutions – in the shape of the National Assembly, the Welsh Assembly Government, and an emerging legal jurisdiction – we have less and less excuse to be labouring under a sense of subordination to England.
