The Economist it seems, will be summing this all up very well:

If an election were called next week, Britain might well end up with a Parliament for the next five years that is defined entirely by its views on claiming for bath plugs, rather than on how to get the country out of the worst recession in 70 years.

Take that, Cameron. And, in fairness, take that me. My immediate gut reaction was that a general election would be the best way of allowing individuals to ‘pass judgement’ on their own MPs and start again with a clean slate. Now I’m not so sure (although, to be honest, I just want rid of Brown, I’m not going to lie about that.)

The truth is that a new Government now isn’t going to fix anything. Rather than the simple approach of full online publication of expense claims, the virtues of Statutory Regulation as the Answer To Everything have once again been deployed to delegate decisions regarding MPs expenses to an appointed quango – someone else to take the blame if things go wrong. Ultimately full transparency is not being promised. We’re getting an ideologically driven fudge. Another Fucking Quango. Brilliant.

Alix Mortimer (is she the most influential Lib Dem Blogger? I know I’m terrified of her – which probably suggest she is) is in conspiratoral mood at the moment. It’s quite odd watching her transformation from blogger to full-blown campaigner, using whatever influence she’s accumulated to begin pushing a parlimentary reform agenda.

Then there’s Liberal Vision who are doing everything they can to turn Nick Clegg into, “Clean Up Clegg.”

Truth is that reform of Westminster and our whole system of politics is something that Lib Dems have always wanted but the rules of the game mean that it’s never been something we can seriously campaign on. It’s a ‘process’ story so therefore people aren’t interested. Yet here ‘the process’ is the story. It’s the only story (apart from yet more u-turns and “betrayals” of the “progressive movement” by Obama, something I will be getting stuck into sooner or later), in fact.

Alix is right. There’s never, ever going to be a better chance of getting reform, and an election now – one that managed to successfully dispel the anger – would go down in history as the Mother of all wasted opportunities for the Mother of all parliaments.