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He was young, perhaps 24 years old, with a fashionable haircut and toned body. He had a girl’s name tattooed on his arm, someone he’d loved. His head was flung back and his arms stretched out, and when they tried to move him on to the narrow silver table, it was like moving a rubber doll. Around his throat was a thin blue cord tied so tightly that the skin had folded over it. Frayed ends indicated where the police officer had cut him down from the tree on which he’d chosen to hang himself.
   The pathologist flicked through a folder of notes. The boy was a drinker, a depressive, a bit of a troublesome loner. His school career was messy and he’d drifted a lot afterwards. He’d tried to get himself back on the straight and narrow a few times and was finally getting treatment. It was looking like he’d turned the corner but then, over the weekend, he’d been found dead in the grounds of a Salvation Army hospital. Another Monday morning in Edinburgh City mortuary. Another young suicide. Another death certificate to sign.
   This Edinburgh mortuary suite is perhaps the most famous in the country, at least to crime readers. It’s here that Ian Rankin sets Inspector Rebus’s post mortems. The suite is a large cold room with white walls and a hard lino floor. One wall is taken up with the vast steel doors of the lift that carries bodies up from the cold store below. Some distance away is a glass wall where interested observers and legal officials can stand and watch, safe from the full horror of human mortality. The three shining metal tables in the operating theatre-style room had been working constantly through the morning. Perhaps 12 bodies so far. When I’d arrived outside the modern, square building in the heart of the gothic old town at 9am, I’d never seen a corpse. Now I felt like a veteran. And yet there was something about the blue cord and the tattoo that made everything feel raw again - it’s always the detail, the hint of normality that hurts the most.
   Before the kid, I’d been astonished at how quickly the process of a post mortem is normalised by a reeling brain. The process sounds brutal. First, the pathologist makes a cut across the back of the head and peels forward the skin until the face is almost off. Using an electric saw they cut open the skull and remove and weigh the brain, then return it and seal everything back up. After that, they move to the torso, cutting it open and working through all the internal organs, weighing, slicing and measuring. They take samples and look at them under a microscope. After they’ve processed all possible medical indicators, they replace everything - almost tenderly - then sew the wound up with the care a surgeon might give to a living patient. I’d expected gallows humour, but mostly they worked with quiet precision - two or three white-coated pathologists to a table, reading numbers from electronic scales to each other: ‘Heart, 260 milligrams.’
   Perhaps it’s this routine that gradually quashes your instinctive horror and nausea - although, for some reason, you never stop finding fat repulsive as it spills out of a distended belly like cold yellow custard. Fortunately, modern post-mortem suites are designed to conceal the smell.
   Most of us don’t end up on the slab. Most death certificates are signed by doctors who attend the final hours of the deceased. For a thousand years, however, the state has wanted to know how every one of its citizens died. Every corpse needs a signature. Every death needs a reason.
   The morgue is a Victorian update of a system established by Alfred the Great. It’s where certain deaths are resolved - those where the cause is unclear or is the result of intended or accidental violence. The bodies are almost always victims in some way - of crime, suicides and car crashes - but also of loneliness. It’s where you go if you die alone in your flat and your body lies undisturbed for days.
   This morgue’s master is Professor Anthony Busuttil, in his mid-50s, with dark hair and twinkling eyes. He is regius professor of forensic medicine at the University of Edinburgh and a clinical forensic medical examiner for Lothian and Borders police. He was the pathologist at the Lockerbie disaster. He’s worked here for 19 years, dealing with some 40 bodies a week, or just over 2,000 a year in a city of half a million souls. In the past five years, he’s noticed a change in the pattern of his work.
   ‘The deaths have become tinged with such despair,’ he says. ‘There are more suicides than there used to be. Suicide used to be the prerogative of the young, 18- to 25-year-olds. Now we’re seeing suicides right up to the 70s. We’re also seeing more and more bodies that have been lying around for weeks. More than ever before, people are dying at home, on their own and nobody cares. No neighbours have knocked. No one has taken a blind bit of notice. We are, without doubt, becoming less and less of a caring society.’
   Over Christmas, these deaths were at their peak. Suicides, home-alone corpses, drug and alcohol-related deaths and murders all peak during the season of goodwill. One day last week, for instance, Busuttil saw an 18-year-old who had died of a drugs overdose, a 52-year-old autistic man who had died of bronchial pneumonia, a 47-year-old alcoholic who had fallen down the stairs, a 43-year-old epileptic who had inhaled her own vomit, a 59-year-old victim of a heart attack, a 49-year-old who had died from alcohol poisoning and a 43-year-old drug user killed by pneumonia - all found days after they died. While the rest of the country took two weeks off, Busuttil’s team were coping with an almost overwhelming tide of fatalities.
   After the boy’s stretcher clanked back down into the basement, an older man took his place on the slab. His chest was big and powerful with strange geometric shapes on it - ‘the defibrillator,’ said an assistant. ‘He’d been off work for a few months with a damaged shoulder,’ Busuttil read from his notes. ‘On the Monday, he told one of his neighbours that he had indigestion pain in his chest and stomach and went out to buy some tablets. A few days later, the police found his body.’
   The man’s heart weighed almost 500mg, way above the average 240mg-360mg. Out came his pancreas and the professor called me over. He pointed to some white, soapy spots in the dark red flesh. ‘It’s called fat necrosis. The pancreas is inflamed. His liver’s enormous. This man is a heavy drinker, probably six pints a day. Maybe spirits,’ said Busuttil. ‘The heart’s too big, and if you look at his arteries, they’re damaged, furring up. It’s arterial atheroma, which is Greek. It translates as porridge. The arteries were blocked and the heart had to pump extra hard to get the blood round, which is why it’s so big.’
   Although Busuttil’s official report was laced with jargon, his basic finding translates as: this man sat at home and drank himself to death. ‘Social services are not as good as they might be in terms of vulnerable people being visited often enough,’ he says. ‘Resources are finite, the problem is becoming bigger, there are more demands not only on medical and social services, but on everybody else. Mortgages have to be paid, the bills keep coming, there are more and more demands on people. We want cosy, complete lives and we want to look after ourselves rather than anybody else - even our families. If social services had more money or more staff ... but they have to channel their resources into priorities.’
   Priorities. Of course. Where do you put finite resources? Well, you have a list. Some things are at the top and some things are at the bottom. And this year, the idea of priorities is in the air in a new and alarming way. There is the notion that smokers bring it on themselves, so perhaps we shouldn’t spend quite so much on treating them. George Best’s doctor said he wished we could predict if an alcoholic would relapse before deciding to spend good money on their liver transplant. At the core is the nagging idea that some people deserve to die.
   If we took Busuttil’s bodies and made a subtle switch - if, instead of finding seven neglected corpses on his table in one small city on one ordinary day, he found seven dead children, or seven dead nursing mothers, or seven dead former models killed by stranglers in the woods - we might expect a different reaction. We might expect front pages and campaign groups and embattled government ministers appearing on the Today programme to promise legislation. But it’s not easy to stand next to an ugly, overweight 42-year-old man - a man who probably smells a little funny - and ask the public to care enough to save him. There’s no glamour in the hacking cough of a bad-tempered alcoholic and no glory in putting your arms around a vicious junkie who pretends to be homeless. Jamie Oliver’s ratings won’t peak if he tries to improve the diet of a fat man living on tinned food and super-strength lager. Even the suicide ... If I’d met him outside the morgue, a troublesome, aggressive kid who’d left school before 16 and liked a drink and a row, would my heart have bled in the way it did when I saw the blue cord tight around his neck?
   There is a class of people emerging - irritating, ignorant and incompetent people - from whom we as individuals, as professionals and as a society are turning away. The consequences can be fatal, not just for the heart-attack victim on the slab, but for the children of people who could easily have been his neighbours. Last month, Professor Pat Cantrill published a report on David Askew and Sarah Whittaker, the Sheffield couple who locked their five starving children in excrement-smeared bedrooms while they spent benefit money on drink, state-of-the-art TV equipment and computer games. It blamed low expectations by care workers. These low expectations, this idea that the couple weren’t quite as good at being parents as people with professional qualifications, allowed police, teachers and social workers to ignore a situation where maggots filled the nappy of a one-year-old child, who was rescued hours from death.
   Of course, a couple chomping takeaway pizza while shushing the kids so they can watch a DVD is not the tasteful face of deprivation. There is no The Road to Wigan Pier nobility in such suffering. And yet something has to be wrong if people living in the world’s fourth-largest economy, at a time when that economy is richer than it’s ever been, are killing themselves or their children and no one seems to notice. Perhaps we have codified poverty as emaciation and rags. We don’t want to help someone who’s one step removed from a chav, the acceptable insult for the working class. These people eat too much and watch TV. They ought to know better. They should do something about it. They are, to use the phrase in various pieces of oppressive legislation passed from 1601 to 1834, the ‘undeserving poor’.
   If you can judge a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable, what can you say about one that would prefer not to notice them, that sees the vulnerable as somebody else’s problem? Professor Busuttil rarely sees non-white bodies in his suite, and those who do end up there are almost always victims of crime. He believes it’s because the idea of community is still strong in Edinburgh’s Asian and Chinese populations. The white majority, however, care less for their friends and family and are more prepared to let the undeserving fall by the wayside as they march on to an Ikea-designed vision of reasonably-priced prosperity.
   Last year, a coroner in Walsall expressed horror after the body of 63-year-old Kenneth Mann was found in his flat six years after he died, and then only because the flats were to be demolished. Mann’s fully clothed body was discovered on a bed. He had been admitted to Walsall Manor hospital after a drunken fall the day before he died. Doctors carried out an ECG test and one of the pads from that test was still in his sock. The coroner said it appeared Mann had ‘fallen through the net’, and went on to say, ‘society needs to ask how such a situation could arise in the 21st century.’ But the evidence of Busuttil’s post-mortem suite suggests this question springs from a flawed assumption. He assumes this century will offer the greatest level of care that society has experienced to date. The bodies on the slab, and the children in care, suggest it is quite the opposite. In 21st-century Britain, these incidents will only increase.
   — The Guardian

Israelis rejoiced over Yasser Arafat’s death. After demonising him and making him a non-person in order to confine him to his battered headquarters in Ramallah, Ariel Sharon had his way. Submissively, the Americans followed suit.
   Palestinians on the street and the radical wings of the Palestinian movement have greeted the end of the Sharon era with joy. But the leadership of the Palestinian Authority is more ambivalent. It is gnawed by uncertainty over the future. Yet it can indulge in half a smile.
   Sharon left his mission half-finished. After tearing up the Oslo accords and ensuring the end of a two-state solution, his troops’ withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was a tactical diversion to ensure that he could keep the bulk of the West Bank and permanently seal the fate of occupied East Jerusalem by completing the wall, grabbing more territory in the process.
   Sharon’s ploy was simple. He said he had no real Palestinian counterpart to negotiate with. So he would determine what the contours of the new Greater Israel would be. His advantage was his reputation as a great military tactician Israelis forgot his great strategic mistakes, particularly in Lebanon and he had the will power and charisma to push through his solutions.
   Indeed, after co-founding the right-wing Likud party after he left the army in 1973 and leaving it recently to found a new Kadima (Forward) party, Sharon was in an enviable position. He had President Bush eating out of his hand and the illegal wall he began building bought Israelis a measure of security. It was, in fact, the George W. Bush administration that gave him the freedom to destroy the infrastructure of the European-funded Palestinian Authority and reoccupy Palestinian towns. And with Arafat, the embodiment of Palestinian statehood, dead, Sharon had the space to carve out the Greater Israel of his choice.
   Historically, in recent decades, the United States has been led by Israel, rather than the other way around. As Sharon went about destroying the so-called road map framed by Washington, the Bush administration sang the song of a two-state solution even as President Bush foreclosed the option by ceding illegal settlements around Jerusalem to Israel and gave Sharon the prize by barring the Palestinians’ “right of return”, the coming home of disposed Palestinians in most instances, their children who were thrown out or fled on the formation of the Israeli state in 1948 and are still living in refugee colonies in neighbouring Arab states.
   What now? The truth is that it needed a larger than life figure like Sharon who had the war credentials to offer his countrymen the security they craved for while ensuring the benevolence of the Bush administration in tearing up Oslo and the road map. He does not have an immediate replacement.
   The natural successor, Ehud Olmert, does not have the stature or charisma to hammer the final nails into the coffin of the Palestinian state.
   Palestinians, therefore, might have a glimmer of hope that they could salvage something from the wreck of the Palestinian state of their dreams.
   Much attention will now be devoted to the forthcoming elections in Israel and the fate of the Kadima party without Sharon, as also to the problematical Palestinian parliamentary elections later this month. Sharon was right in waiting out the end of Arafat before setting to achieve his objective. The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, has proved a damp squib and Palestinians are already playing to the Israeli mood music by perpetuating chaos in Gaza. It is an indication of how much of a prison Gaza is that Israelis have now carved a buffer zone as usual at the altar of security.
   Sharon had sought to resolve a central Israeli dilemma. Demographically, Israel would cease to be a Jewish state if it were to continue to rule over all Palestinian territories. Gaza was always peripheral to Israeli designs, and it required Sharon the bulldozer, as he was called, to get the settlers out kicking and screaming. The irony of the father of illegal settlements forcing some of them out was not lost upon Israel or the world.
   Sharon’s real design was clear. He wished to foreclose East Jerusalem’s return to Palestinians and create a fortress which would not merely cut the West Bank left to Palestinians into ribbons through apartheid roads and tunnels but fragment the bits of territory given to them to make a viable state untenable. Sharon’s exit from the political scene, therefore, comes at a crucial moment. It offers a slender opportunity to reverse a plan that would plunge Israel, Palestine and the region into a hundred years’ war.
   Is there reason for hope? In part, the answer lies with the European Union. Thus far, Brussels’ role has been little short of shameful; its most humiliating act was to agree to become a member of the so-called Quartet (the others being the US, Russia and the UN) whose only task was to rubberstamp whatever Washington desired. There have been few European protests over the traditional Israeli use of excessive force to subdue Palestinians and there seemed little sense of shock over the destruction of Palestinian infrastructure the European Union had funded.
   The United States had made it amply clear that it would not tolerate any mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation other than itself. The surprise was that the EU agreed to be a dumb spectator while seemingly endorsing America’s blatant pro-Israeli moves. Perhaps the continental European powers did not wish to open another front in the transatlantic standoff after the bitter divisions over the American invasion of Iraq. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan probably had the same reasons for his temerity. Palestinians suffered as a consequence.
   Sharon’s departure from the political scene gives the European Union, Russia and the wider international community the opportunity to reflect on the consequences of the Sharon plan for greater Israel. Given America’s compulsions to support Israel in all it does, Europe and the rest of the world could inject a dose of realism to prevent the great tragedy that would befall the region.