There are those who don’t believe politics is a real job, never mind a proper career.

A wave of anti-politics, of populist cynicism about the elites of parties and governments, has crashed across Scotland, the UK and much of democratic Europe and North America.

Scroll through social media or even flick through the pages of some newspapers and it is hard to miss the contempt some of us feel for elected members and their entourages. 

And a few, especially the very online, target particular scorn at those they see as career - or even “careerist” - politicians. 

And yet these are exactly the people which parties choose as candidates - and for whom we collectively vote.

More than two out of three of the MPs elected last Thursday in Scotland are political professionals. That is to say they did paid work in politics before they first won their seats in the House of Commons.

For a few this will only have been a year or two as a councillor, a constituency worker, a think-tanker, a policy wonk or a special advisor. For others, they will have spent much of their lives working in politics, honing their skills.

The wave of populism, of course, is not just aimed at political elites - but at perceived educated and economic ones too. 

Now, our elected members at Westminster or Holyrood are certainly not one-percenters or billionaire oligarchs. 

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But they are largely drawn from a pool of people with relatively similar backgrounds. Around one in five went to a fee-paying school, way out of kilter the national average. 

Back in 2015 when the SNP swept Labour away just six per cent of MPs were privately educated. But the share has risen in recent years, especially after last week’s election. 

Remember, in a small cohort like 57 even a few random events can produce spectacular change in percentage terms.

The vast majority of our MPs went to university. And even in these days of rising access to higher education, that is far from typical of the population at large. 

Our  ancient Scottish institutions have a far bigger grip on our politics than Oxbridge has on England. We do not like the comparison. But, and this has happened again this year, typically a quarter of our MPs and MSPs went to Glasgow University. This seat of learning can make a credible case for being far more democratic than Oxford or Cambridge. 

But the reality is that a fair number of national elected members share similar experiences of higher education - and sometimes even the same lecture or lunch halls. Or school yards.

Is this a problem? Is the rise of university-educated political professionals a bad thing? 

After all, we prefer the people who teach our children, drive our buses or remove our gall bladders to be qualified and experienced. Why not those who make our laws? 

Populism, in its classic anti-elite sense, can be appealing. So can the desire to have well-educated and politically tested people govern the country. People who have a career in public life inhabit the real world, of course they do. But where do they come from? Are they reflective of the wider population. This is where it gets interesting.

Former Labour leader Kezia Dugdale has been campaigning to broaden the base of politics. 

She, - astutely, I thought - once told this paper that what mattered was the wider “ecosphere” from whom we choose our elected members.

"How healthy and diverse is it?" she said. "If it is dominated by one particular force – and I would argue that force is still white middle aged men – then the market is broken.”