ST JOHN’S, Antigua (AP) – Longtime opposition leader Baldwin Spencer was sworn in as prime minister yesterday after a decisive victory in elections that ended nearly 60 years of dominance of a family political dynasty in Antigua and Barbuda.

Spencer, a 55 year-old labour activist, took the oath of office at the governor-general’s residence before hundreds of supporters and politicians. He said the Caribbean country’s government would get to work right away.

“There is no honeymoon period in this business,” Spencer said. “We have to get down to work because we have a packed agenda.”

His predecessor, Lester Bird, conceded defeat earlier yesterday. With all votes counted, preliminary results from Tuesday’s vote showed Spencer’s United Progressive Party with 12 of 17 parliamentary seats. Bird himself was unseated by Errol Cort, a former attorney-general whom Bird fired in 2001.

“I think that the people have decided that it was a time for change,” Bird said.

A whopping 91 per cent of eligible voters turned out to cast ballots, up from 65 per cent in the last elections in 1999, electoral officials said.

The Bird family has dominated politics in Antigua since the 1940s.

The late Vere Bird Snr, a former Salvation Army captain, and the founder of the family dynasty, helped form the Antigua Trades and Labour Union (ATLU) during the 1938 labour upheavals across the Caribbean, and in 1945 became an elected member of the Legislative Council in colonial Antigua.

Bird became chief minister of Antigua in the 1950s when Cabinet government was introduced and later became premier under a system of quasi-independence, called associated statehood, in the late 1960s.

The grip of the Bird family on Antiguan politics loosened for a short period in the 1970s, starting with a split in the ATLU in 1968 and the formation of the rival Antigua Workers Union (AWU) by several lieutenants, led by George Walter. Spencer was among its early officers.

This group subsequently led the formation of the now defunct Progressive Labour Movement (PLM), which swept to office in 1971, but held power for only one term until the ALP was returned to government in 1976.

The elder Bird led his country to independence in 1981 and was prime minister until he retired in 1994, when Lester Bird won elections.

In Tuesday’s election, Lester Bird garnered only 45 per cent of the votes in his constituency, and his ALP came away with just four seats, down from its previous nine.

Bird’s government had been badly damaged by scandals that in recent years have centred on allegations of bribery, misuse of funds in the national health insurance plan, and a 13-year-old girl’s charges that he and his brother used her for sex and to procure cocaine. Bird, 66, denied the last charges and organised an inquiry that found no evidence.

Apparently anticipating defeat, Bird had workers remove boxes of “personal items” from his office over the weekend, drawing hundreds of protesters who accused him of carting away incriminating documents. Bird dismissed the charges as “absolutely crazy”.

As the results came out early yesterday, Spencer danced a traditional jig to a calypso beat. He called for healing and reconciliation, but also warned: “Crimes committed against the people must be punished.”

An observer team from the Caribbean Community praised the peaceful vote and said the results “clearly reflect the will of the people”. Among recommendations, it urged the Electoral Commission to strengthen its independence.

One seat was undecided due to a tie on the smaller island of Barbuda. Officials said a new vote would be held there in the coming weeks.

Among opposition winners was Jacqui Quinn-Leandro, a 38 year-old consultant who becomes Antigua’s first woman to hold a House seat.

Bird’s party had campaigned on a record of four per cent growth in an economy based on sagging tourism and an offshore banking industry that critics say is corrupt.

Spencer’s party has pledged greater unemployment benefits and funding for school uniforms and lunches.

The new leader named four ministers to his Cabinet, including lawyer Harold Lovell as foreign minister and Cort, who defeated Bird, as finance minister.

Bird’s government repeatedly weathered scandals. In 2002, an inquiry into fraud in the national health insurance programme implicated 12 officials, including two ministers. Seven people have been charged.

In June, three legislators left Bird’s party to protest a decision not to hold a vote of confidence nor debate corruption allegations.

Even in earlier years there were scandals. In the late 1970s, the Bird government was accused of facilitating the shipment of weapons to apartheid South Africa by a company called Space Research Corporation/High Altitude Research Project, one of whose founders, Gerald Bull, developed a gun with the record of delivering a projectile the farthest.

Bull was later implicated in the development of a super gun for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and was believed to have been assassinated by the Israeli Mossad.

Lester Bird’s brother, Vere Bird Jr, was accused of shipping Israeli arms to Colombia’s Medellin drug cartel in 1989. He lost his Cabinet post but was never prosecuted.