The government suffered yet another electoral disaster last night, losing a previously safe parliamentary seat to the Conservatives.

Their candidate, Edward Timpson, beat Labour’s Tasmin Dunwoody, by overturning a 7,000 plus deficit to win by near the same margin, their first by-election gain since 1982 on a swing of 17.6 per cent. Although Labour have suffered losses on bigger swings, for example, Brent East, Dunfermiline & West Fife and Glasgow Govan, in the past, last night’s defeat will be seen as evidence that the government is continuing to lose its way.

Not surprisingly, there has been a lot of usual ‘advice’ for Prime Minister Gordon Brown from the political centre left, ranging from Labour MPs to newspaper commentators. However, what happens from now is that the present (mal)administration is at death’s door, and no amount of pulling and prodding will revive it.

It was another day on the financial markets that the price of oil rose yet again to another record high. At time of writing it’s standing at around $135 a barrel, up from around $65 a barrel a year ago. This will certainly lead to even higher prices for filling up our cars at the petrol pumps in the UK.

The current average price of unleaded is around 114 pence per litre, while for diesel it’s around 126 pence per litre. This has also contributed to the rise in the use of gas and electricity, making it more expensive to make goods and transport them from one place to another. Then there the rises on basic foods like rice. Of course there are the usual threats of fuel protests and the demand from business to ask the government to reduce their tax take, but what use will that be in the long term?

Higher energy prices are happening simply because demand for fossil fuels are greater than the actual supply, and no amount of prodding from the US or EU is going to force OPEC (mainly, Middle East)-producing countries to increase that supply any time soon.

This situation could have been avoided if world governments had put forward and implemented long-term plans to reduce their reliance on oil, but the typical short-termist policies of our politicians have created a crisis, if left unchecked, will alter the negative impact of climate change on the planet forever. Don’t say we haven’t been warned.

Members of Parliament are voting this week on four amendments to the proposed ‘Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill’. The most controversial part of the legislation deals with the issue of abortion rights, with MPs voting on whether to reduce the current upper abortion limit from the current 24 weeks to 20.

The campaign to reduce the limit has been spearheaded by Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, and many commentators who argue that Britain’s level of abortions are too high, and need to be cut back. However, there are others  who want the current limit to be retained. There has been a huge media debate over a woman’s ‘right to choose’ on this matter.

For once, all too rarely in Parliament, our elected representatives will get the chance to make the decision as ‘an issue of conscience’, not by being told what to do, but will they be voting the right way? It seems that a very personal thing, about a woman deciding to abort the child she doesn’t want, has been repeatedly turned into a political and religious football. There are so many issues that affect women in the UK, but none arose so much anger and passion as abortion does. Surely we need to find out why so many women need to terminate unwanted pregnancies, and to put forward sensible proposals to deal with the problem. We also need to recognise what women do with their bodies in private are their business, and (particularly male) politicians, bloggers, or religious firebrands have no right to interfere with that.