The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) has just given us a wonderful example of how politics can stray down paths that are unwise. Babies cry, dogs bark and politicians legislate. When we have a problem, sometimes even one that is beyond solution on heaven or earth, we feel that we have to so something. It is often better to do nothing,
as history proves. Under the previous Labour Government, 75 Bills were passed that have never been implemented; they went through the House but nothing happened afterwards. It is the futile urge of the political class—that is what we are—to feel that we must always do something, usually by legislating, but often that multiplies the problem that we are trying to address.
In 1991, my friend and colleague Roy Hughes, who was a Member of the House for 30 years, first for Newport and then for Newport East, managed to bring through the Bill that designated badgers as a protected species. It was part of a movement that has been going on for a long time to ensure that we, as the superior species, treat all other living beings with respect and protect them from gratuitous suffering.
One of the issues that I have with the House is the need to make it more representative of the population as a whole. We have certainly made great progress in that regard by increasing the number of women Members, of which you, Madam Deputy Speaker, are a splendid example, as are the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy). What a splendid debate we have had. I have been tempted to go and have my lunch, for which I have been waiting for some time, because I feel a sense of redundancy as a result of the brilliant way that they put their case in their speeches and in their interventions, some of which were not answered. My hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) intervened on the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) to ask a very pertinent question: why has there been an increase in bovine TB?
One of my jobs in ensuring that the House is more representative relates to a group—there are millions of them in the population—that is grossly under-represented: we have a desperate shortage of octogenarians. I am looking forward to the people of Newport West putting that right in 2015. One of the joys that come with old age is a long memory. I can recall the fuss about bovine TB in 1946, when I was 11 years old. There were then 47,476 cases of bovine TB in 1946, but the figure had fallen to 628 in 1979. It would be simplistic to suggest that that was because of the arrival of Clement Attlee and the glorious dawn of socialism between 1945 and 1951, before the beginning of the dark age of Thatcherism in 1979. It was not Thatcher. We know that we went for 20 years with fewer than 1,000 cases of bovine TB a year.