THE latest round of sleaze allegations has resulted in serial calls for politicians to abandon their second jobs and for reform of the House of Lords. Both of these are terrible ideas. Politicians should have second jobs and multiple incomes. And we need House of Commons reform far more urgently than House of Lords reform. Turning the upper house into an elected chamber would be a disaster.

I know these are unpopular opinions, but knee-jerk populism is often wrong – and this is no exception.

Let’s take first the calls demanding that no MP or MSP does anything else whilst they serve as a member of parliament. The first problem with this is that being an MP or an MSP is not a full-time job. If it were then no MP or MSP would have the time to serve as a minister, let alone as Prime Minister or First Minister. Even when Parliament is sitting the job of an MSP can be done in less than three days of the week, and Parliament sits for only 30-something weeks of the year.

Requiring that our elected parliamentarians do nothing else is condemning them to a life of infernal boredom. If they want to write a book, ply a trade, or develop their business interests on the side, they should be not only permitted but encouraged to do so. Indeed – I would go further – I would make it a requirement. All MPs and MSPs should be required to make a meaningful contribution to the world of work whilst they serve in parliament.

READ MORE: Are red deer just a pest? 

It is not merely an incidental benefit that our policy-makers have real world experience outside politics: it is an essential prerequisite. Insulating politicians from the demands and stresses of the outside world is a guarantee of poor policy and misguided law.

It goes without saying that politicians should not be able to profiteer from being in Parliament, that all relevant interests need to be properly registered, and that any conflict of interest is to be avoided. Politicians should not be able to lobby. Any taking of cash for questions, or for access, is obviously inappropriate. But these matters are all against the rules already – that Owen Paterson breached them is why it was recommended that he be suspended from the Commons for a lengthy period of time. Far from his case showing that the rules need to be reformed, it shows they work.

As for the House of Lords, one of the truly magnificent things about the upper house is that its members are not salaried. A peer may claim a modest £300 daily rate but only when the peer attends the House on a sitting day. Even turning up every single day – and very few do that – would yield an annual income of less than £45,000 (about half what an MP earns in a year). This means that members of the House of Lords more or less have to have additional employment. They are all part-time parliamentarians.

This has numerous advantages, and not only that it makes the House of Lords far cheaper to run. It means that peers tend to turn up only for business they are interested in. Legally trained peers might turn up for and participate in debates about law reform. Peers who have served in the armed forces may take part in debates about defence policy or military spending. Peers with a life-long interest in social policy will lead deliberations on health, or social care, or child poverty. And so on.

The House of Commons and the Scottish Parliament are full of amateurs, pontificating on matters about which they know next to nothing, whilst in the House of Lords experts share their experience and learning not in order to score petty party-political points, but genuinely in order to try and improve government policy and make better law.

Before I was elected to the Scottish Parliament I was privileged to work in the House of Lords for six years, as a legal adviser to the Lords Constitution Committee. That experience transformed my understanding of what made for a good legislature. For the quality of the work undertaken in the House of Lords far exceeds anything I’ve seen in either the Commons or in Holyrood.

Elected party politics is theatre – show business for ugly people, as one American wit had it. As often as not that theatre descends into farce. Pantomime is seasonal in Britain’s playhouses, but permanent in our parliaments. Except not in the House of Lords. In the Lords they take their work seriously and devote their own time, their expertise and their authority to it.

This used to be widely understood and uniformly appreciated. But in the modern age we have lost sight of it entirely. Once upon a time we knew that democracy was a value that needed to be cherished, yes, but which also needed to be checked, to ensure it did not run out of control. Two and a half millennia ago Aristotle taught us that there are only two forces capable of undertaking this task. He called them monarchy (rule of the one) and aristocracy (rule of the few).

A healthy democracy requires a vibrant aristocracy to hold it in check, to ask it to think twice, to scrutinise its assumptions and, where necessary, to revise its opinions. By aristocracy I mean what Aristotle meant – a select few, a Senate, if you will – I do not mean the landed gentry.

At its best, this essential task of revision is what the House of Lords did – and still does. Fiddling with the upper chamber, diminishing its powers or, even worse, moving it onto an elected footing, would make it not a check on the Commons but a rival to the Commons. And no one who has spent any time watching the House of Commons could think that what the country needs is a clone of that place. One of them is bad enough.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.