By-election defeat spells fresh woe for British PM

UK: Prime Minister Gordon Brown was dealt a fresh blow on Friday after his party suffered a crushing by-election defeat in a previously safe Labour seat.

Just three weeks after trouncing the ruling Labour party in local elections, the opposition Conservatives won their first by-election victory over Labour since 1982, taking the Crewe and Nantwich constituency in northwest England.

Edward Timpson won 20,539 votes (49 percent of the total) to 12,679 (30 percent) for Labour's Tamsin Dunwoody.

That represented a 17.6 percent swing from the last election in 2005, the BBC reported.

Turn-out for the vote was 58.2 percent, considered high for a by-election.

"Today you have rejected the old politics, and voted for the positive alternative, put forward by the Conservative Party," Timpson said in his victory speech.

"You have sent a message, loud and clear, that Gordon Brown just does not get it and the government needs to change," he added.

The by-election was triggered by the death last month of the veteran parliamentarian Gywneth Dunwoody, the mother of the defeated Labour candidate, to whom Timpson paid fulsome tribute in his victory speech.

It was a measure of the scale of Labour's defeat that at the last election Gywneth Dunwoody held a majority of 7,078 votes over the Conservatives: on Friday, Timpson's majority was 7,860.

It was the first time the Conservatives had won the seat since it was created in 1983.

The defeat was just one more headache for Brown. Labour's latest humiliation came just three weeks after the party suffered its worst local poll results in 40 years.

It was the first chance for voters to respond to the government compensation package for the low paid, which itself was prompted by widespread outrage at the abolition of the lowest rate of income tax in April.

London, Friday, AFP