If Mick expect people in England to get all patriotically aerated about this, I think and hope he's mistaken.

This is a sad case that invites people to try to working out what may have gone wrong, and how people (neighbours and social services) could perhaps respond better to a situation like this. And that is something we should welcome.

There's a saying you sometimes hear - "They're good neigbours - you'd hardly know they are there". It sounds rather as if that kind of attitude may have been in play here - but I don't think anyone should leap to the assumption that this is a matter of bad neighbours or of incompetent or uncaring officials.

If it was a matter of a reclusive person who didn't ask for help, and perhaps indicated he didn't want people poking their nose into his business, it's easy enough to see how this could have happened. It doesn't even have to be a case of unhelpful or indifferent neighbours, especially if, as tends to be the case in many cities, the turnover of neighbours was such as to mean that they had no reason to know anything about this man, except that he didn't seem to want to socialise.

The cutbacks in all kind of social support systems which started under Thatcher, and which have never been reversed may well have contributed to this. Terms like "nanny state" have been used to justify a care system in which the notion of social worker sort community workers actually looking for situations where things are going wrong, with a view to finding ways of helping, has been vigorously discouraged.

The irony is that at the very same time that there has been talk about "Care in the Community" as a slogan, the policy in practice has been to fail to support and even to damage existing patterns of care in the community.

In principle the idea of closing down the big institutions that had been presented as providing "care" was completely right, just as it had been right to close down the workhouses a generation or so earlier. For example the big subnormality hospitals and mental asylums were basically awful places. People were often shut away out of sight and out of mind for lifetimes, and institutionally neglected or abused.

The failure was that as these were closed down, the resources, human and financial which were needed to provide adequate support within the community was not forthcoming. The institutions were closed, the land sold and developed, and the cash was all too often effectively embezzled - used to pay for other things, or to keep taxes down, rather than being available towards the cost of for real care in the community.