It seems that each week brings a new story about how creative our MPs are when claiming expenses. Paying for gardeners, nannies and kitchens; claiming to pay off the mortgage on a home; pouring money into the pockets of family and friends. You name it, greedy MPs have done it.

In spite of being caught comprehensively fiddling their expenses in so many ingenious ways, our MPs have voted to award themselves even more of our money while reducing the need for them to explain what they have done with this money.

Our MPs claim that they need their generous expenses because they are poorly paid compared to other "professionals".

However, while pleading poverty, they seem to forget a few far from minor details.

Firstly, they receive more than £60,000 a year for about 33 weeks' work – they have about 19 weeks holiday a year.

Moreover, they have given themselves the most generous pension scheme in Britain.

An ordinary person would have to put an incredible £50,000 each year into pension savings to receive the same pension benefits as an MP. Taking their pensions into account, our MPs actually earn more than £110,000 a year.

Fortunately, few MPs have to live on these generous piles of our cash. Cabinet ministers all get a salary of about £138,000 a year (with more than four months' holiday). Most whips, deputy whips, speakers and deputy speakers pick up more than £100,000 a year each.

Many MPs hold obscure roles in civil service departments, such as health, education, defence, justice and so on, adding many tens of thousands of pounds to their annual takings.

Other MPs of all parties sit on a plethora of committees, most of which are completely powerless hot-air factories, but which nevertheless considerably boost their members' meagre annual earnings.

MPs can also earn tens and even hundreds of thousands of pounds a year by acting as consultants for private companies – a privilege which is not available to most people in other professions.

And then, of course, there is much more cash to be picked up by appearing on TV and radio and writing newspaper articles.

If our MPs were hugely overworked, their massive remuneration might be justified. However, each year they actually have less and less to do.

When this Government swept to power in May, 1997, less than half our legislation was initiated and authored in the European Union. By 2001, this had reached 55 per cent and, according to an answer given in 2007 in the German Parliament (the UK Government has refused to provide the same information), 84 per cent of their legislation now comes directly from the EU.

If you owned a corner shop and you lost more than half of your customers, you might then consider reducing your staff and even paying yourself slightly less money. Yet our leaders have never considered cutting their numbers to match their greatly reduced workload.

In fact, they keep awarding themselves larger salaries, increased pensions and ever more allowances to do about half the amount of work that they were doing just over a decade ago.

In the last five years alone, the amount of money our MPs have taken in salaries and expenses has gone up by a satisfying (for them) 64 per cent, from less than £100 million in 2001-2 to more than £155 million in 2006-7.

Over the same period, the number of expense claims submitted by MPs has almost doubled from just over 30,000 a year to close to 60,000, and the number of staff employed to help our MPs do less and less work has gone up by more than a third from about 1,800 to more than 2,500.

In addition to the money paid directly to MPs for salaries and expenses, we also pay £210 million a year for administration, support services and subsidised food and drink at Westminster. In fact, administration costs have increased by about a third in only five years, again at a time when our MPs have had less and less work to do.

When this Government came to power, we had 646 MPs in Westminster and 78 Members of the European Parliament.

Thanks to this Government's efforts to increase bureaucracy, we now also have 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament, 60 Welsh Assembly members and 108 Members of the Legislative Assembly in Northern Ireland – 1,021 politicians to represent the interests of less than 70 million people.

This gives us one politician for about every 68,000 citizens. In the US, with 435 members of Congress, there is a member of Congress for every 680,000 citizens. We don't need 646 MPs and 297 regional politicians any more, or even 500, or even 400.

Conservative leader David Cameron's plan to cut the number of MPs in the House of Commons by 60 if the Tories win the next election does not go far enough.

There is no reason why we should not at least halve the number of UK-based politicians to reflect the continuing and accelerating transfer of political power to the EU.

The total cost to us of our MPs is now more than £366 million a year, and the regional assemblies cost another £178 million. If we reduced the number of MPs to match the recent halving of their workload, we could save about £272 million a year and use the money to improve the living standards of the million poorest pensioners.

Moreover, now that our Prime Minister has rushed into signing the EU Constitution by another name, without asking our permission, more powers will soon move to Brussels, and this will leave even less work for our MPs.

Yet, rather than prudently pruning the number of MPs and their costs to match their ever-decreasing workload, we can expect that the Government will give in to our politicians' pressure for further increases in their salaries, pensions and their allowances.