Ouch !

Despite counting all night only around a third of constituencies have declared a result in the English local council, Scottish Parliamentary and Welsh Assembly elections. In Northern Ireland, where they traditionally do politics quite differently then they do on the British mainland, they have only just started to count the votes this morning (6/5/11).

At this early stage it appears that Conservative Party have stayed roughly where they were. The Labour Party and Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalists) have both made slight gains and the Scottish National Party (SNP) seem to have been the biggest winner with a projected gain of 20 seats. The big story though is that the Liberal Democrats (LibDems) - the junior partner in the national governing coalition - have made significant losses. Of the 1800 seats they held before the election the LibDems have already lost nearly 300 and party officials are hoping the extent of the losses stays as low as 500 seats.

The result of the Alternative Vote (AV) referendum won't be known until around 10pm (22:00) tonight. However exit polls indicate amongst the people who did vote 70% of them voted No.

The depressing fact is that in a year where we've seen thousands of people across the middle east being killed in the fight for democracy only around 20% of people in Britain bothered to vote.