Â鶹Éç

Good morning.

In the run up to Christmas, my children - who are six and four – like to get me to sing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ to them at bedtime, notwithstanding my eminent lack of musical talent. Critics have tended to be rather snooty about this carol – one complaining that the words are ‘ponderous moral doggerel’ which in any don’t fit very well with the tune’s jaunty dance rhythm. All I can say is that the punters don’t seem to mind – I think they enjoy the vivid imagery of the noble king stepping out through the snowy moonlit night, laden with flesh, wine and fu-el for the poor.

For the first time in its 70 year history, UNICEF, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, is responding to a crisis in the United Kingdom, providing money to projects up and down the country - one, for example, supplying breakfast boxes over the Christmas break and February half term to vulnerable children and families in Southwark, south London. The pandemic has hit some families very hard; by October an extra 900,000 children had been registered for free school meals, on top of the 1.4 million already eligible going into the current crisis. UNICEF’s funding will obviously reach some in real need.

What’s gone wrong? How come an agency which normally operates in war zones and in response to grave natural disasters is having to lend its support even to London, one of the richest cities in one of the richest countries in the world?

Forget any aesthetic objections to Good King Wenceslas – perhaps the real objection should be that in celebrating an individual act of charity, the carol is guilty of glorifying what can only ever fill the gaps, but will never get at the root cause of poverty. Of course charity is a good thing – it’s good that the gaps are being filled – but if we are going to make poverty history, as they say, one or two saints marching through the snow are not going to cut it.
It’s worth remembering two things about old Wenceslas however. First, pious legend had it that this wintery trip was not a one off, but that every night he rose from his bed and with bare feet went out to give alms to widows, orphans and prisoners. Second, he was of course a king – well, he was a Duke actually, but the point is the same – namely that the stories told about him are not stories simply of private charity, but of what a good and just ruler should be, and of what good and just rule should look like.

If my poetic abilities were not as negligible as my musical ones, I would try and pen another verse to the carol to express what those legends about Duke Wenceslas are meant to say – that private charity and philanthropy are not at odds with public, governmental justice, but rather that the compassion which the carol celebrates has to have a public face too.

Show less