Cllr Craig Smith is the Deputy Chairman of the Leicestershire Conservatives Area Executive and a councillor for Coalville North Division on Leicestershire County Council.

As someone who uses social media daily, perhaps more accurately, hourly, for both professional and political purposes, you might argue that I am a fine one to talk.

Social media is now embedded in modern politics. For councillors, MPs and campaigners alike, it has become an essential tool. Used responsibly, it allows elected representatives to communicate directly with residents, explain decisions, counter misinformation, share updates and remain visible between elections. In local government, especially where turnout is low and engagement can be difficult, social media can strengthen accountability and trust.

But it is also a double-edged sword.

One poorly chosen phrase, one comment taken out of context, or one lapse in judgement can spread rapidly and live on indefinitely. Screenshots do not disappear. Nor does the reputational damage that can follow. Any elected representative who uses social media regularly understands that risk.

Yet beyond the danger of accidental missteps, there is a more troubling trend emerging, one that poses a serious challenge to the standards and purpose of public office itself.

Across the political spectrum, a small but growing number of individuals are using social media not to represent, inform or engage, but to provoke. They post deliberately inflammatory content, dismiss serious issues with contempt, or make statements designed to outrage rather than contribute. This behaviour is not spontaneous. It is calculated.

What has changed in recent years is the incentive structure. In the past, such behaviour was often about notoriety, chasing attention, relevance, or the thrill of controversy. Today, it is increasingly about money. Many social media platforms now allow accounts to be monetised. Engagement equals income. Likes, shares, comments and reactions all feed an algorithm that rewards outrage far more generously than nuance. Calm explanation does not travel as far as provocation. Division generates clicks. Anger pays.

For private individuals, this may be distasteful but largely self-contained. For elected officials, it is profoundly corrosive.

Councillors and MPs are not paid to generate engagement. They are paid by the taxpayer to represent communities, to attend meetings, to scrutinise decisions, to work with officers, to handle casework and to solve real problems. Their role is grounded in service, not performance.

Yet when an elected representative becomes more invested in posting daily rage-bait than in carrying out the duties of office, the line between public service and personal profit begins to blur.

This is not about free speech. Elected officials are entitled to hold strong views, express unpopular opinions and challenge orthodoxies. Robust debate is healthy in a democracy. But there is a clear distinction between principled disagreement and deliberately provocative content designed solely to inflame emotions and drive engagement.

The issue becomes even more troubling when those posts target vulnerable groups, trivialise serious matters, or dismiss lived experiences, not as part of a reasoned argument, but as a repeated tactic to provoke reaction. When this behaviour becomes routine, it raises legitimate questions about priorities.

Is the primary focus representation, or revenue?

Local government already faces a crisis of trust. Turnout in local elections remains stubbornly low. Many residents feel disconnected from councils and cynical about politics at a local level. When councillors appear more interested in building personal online brands than in addressing potholes, planning disputes or social care pressures, that cynicism deepens.

Worse still, the accountability mechanisms are weak.

You cannot sack an elected councillor for neglecting their duties in favour of monetised social media activity. Codes of conduct are narrow, slow-moving and often ill-suited to dealing with behaviour that is provocative but technically permissible. Party discipline can be applied only to members of the same party, and even then, it is blunt and politically sensitive.

Until the next election, an elected representative is largely free to continue treating public office as a platform for outrage, regardless of the damage done to public discourse or community cohesion.

This creates a perverse incentive. The most extreme voices receive the most attention. Sensible councillors doing unglamorous but vital work rarely go viral. Meanwhile, those willing to say the most shocking thing possible are rewarded with clicks, followers and, increasingly, cash. The result is a distortion of local political debate. Serious issues are drowned out by provocation. Nuanced policy discussions are replaced by culture-war soundbites. Council chambers become secondary to comment sections.

This is not merely a question of tone. It is about the purpose of public office.

If local government becomes a stepping stone to monetised outrage, rather than a vehicle for service and delivery, it risks losing credibility altogether. Residents rightly expect that the people they elect will focus on local priorities, not on feeding an algorithm.

There is also a wider reputational cost. When a handful of councillors behave this way, it reflects poorly on local government as a whole. The vast majority of councillors, across all parties, work hard, unpaid or modestly paid, juggling employment, family life and public service. Their efforts are undermined when public perception is shaped by the loudest and most extreme voices.

Conservatives, in particular, should be concerned about this trend.

Local government has long been one of the party’s strengths: practical problem-solving, fiscal responsibility, community leadership. That tradition is incompatible with treating public office as a side hustle built on outrage.

If we believe in responsibility, service and accountability, then we must be willing to call out behaviour that corrodes those values, even when it is technically permissible, legally protected or politically inconvenient.

None of this requires new laws or heavy-handed regulation. But it does require a cultural shift. Parties, associations and local leaders need to be clearer about expectations. Voters need to ask harder questions about what their representatives actually do between elections. And elected officials themselves need to reflect on whether their online conduct serves their community or merely themselves.

Social media is here to stay. Used well, it can strengthen democracy. Used cynically, it can cheapen it.

Public office should never be reduced to a revenue stream fuelled by division. Those elected to serve should remember a simple truth: their salary comes from the public purse, and their mandate comes from the people they represent, not from an algorithm that rewards outrage.

David Willetts was Minister for Universities and Science 2010-2014 and is a member of the House of Lords.

Many areas of British public policy are subject to wild oscillations and turbulence. Funding higher education is much more stable. For the past twenty years all three political parties, faced with difficult decisions about how to pay for it, have opted for broadly the same model. But as we are seeing again now that does not mean the system is accepted let alone actually welcomed.

Is there a better way?

Graduates do earn more on average than non-graduates. So it is reasonable to expect them to pay back for the cost of their higher education. The repayments, at the rate of 9 per cent, depend on your income and only start above a threshold which for many graduates now stands at £28,470. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has some useful illustrations of what that means.

“Someone earning £35,000 a year pays back £49 per month, 1.6 per cent of their gross earnings. This rises to £161 a month (3.9 per cent) for someone earning £50,000 and £311 a month (5.3 per cent) for someone earning £70,000.”

My focus as minister for universities was to try to hold down the monthly payments which is why we increased the repayment threshold to £21,000 from the level we inherited from Labour. But we were also expecting people to pay back more in total during their working lives.

The burden of graduate “debt” is now a highly charged political issue.

The volume of the debt is a genuine source of concern to many graduates, even though it is not like a commercial loan or a mortgage. (Indeed because it is not a commercial debt with an obligation to pay back whatever your circumstances mortgage lenders look not at the debt but at the repayment as part of fixed out-goings.)

However the debt has turned out much higher than we planned fifteen years ago because of the subsequent decision in 2016 to convert all maintenance grants into loans, adding to the debt. There were also concerns that people needed help on masters courses so loans were extended to them. There was then the burst of high inflation which put up the debt as well especially for graduates earning over about £52,000 for whom there is an interest rate of RPI plus 3 per cent.

The interest rate has always been the issue which arises most unhappiness.

The last big review of higher education funding by Philip Augar proposed there should be a cap of 120 per cent on the total amount of debt. That should now be implemented. There are other attractive proposals as well. Uprating the amount due by CPI not RPI. After setting the higher repayment threshold the Coalition also said it should increase with earnings and that pledge has not always been honoured – indeed it is the latest freeze to the threshold which has inflamed such controversy.

Meanwhile where is the Conservative Party in all this?

The Conservative Party is not obliged to have a position on every part of Government policy. One of the luxuries of opposition is to have some capacity to choose the ground on which to fight. But there is a clear undercurrent of hostility to universities and a belief that too many go. Somehow the growth of higher education is attributed to Tony Blair’s 50 per cent target. But I’ve never met a student who says they went to university because he required them to go and Conservative Governments quite rightly did not set such targets.

The growth of higher education – here and around the world – is the result of choices of young people.

But these student choices need to be well-informed. That is why I fought long and hard to get much better more granular data on labour market outcomes course by course.

Some courses do appear to offer poor economic returns though that involves taking data for some years after graduation and turning it into a forecast of lifetime earnings. And there are other returns to higher education – such as better health including more resilience on mental health – which are not all caught by pay. Nevertheless there needs to be tough intervention from the Office for Students when universities appear to be performing badly. However if the state takes the draconian state of closing down specific courses, we cannot assume that these students will automatically sign on for apprenticeships, even if they are available. They may instead wish to study something else somewhere else.

Conservatives used to be more comfortable with people going to university, seeing it as a route to a decent job. Young people can’t take that for granted now, if they every could. But nor is it hopeless. Between the ages of 23 and 31 earnings grow by 72 per cent for graduates more than double the 31 per cent for non-graduates. For graduates who were on free school meals at school their average earnings growth in those crucial starter years in the jobs market is 75 per cent whereas for non-graduates it is 26 per cent. This may be one of the reasons polling shows 87 per cent of graduates do not regret going to university.

Graduates are also much more likely to be in work – so just comparing the earnings of those in work misses out one of the key benefits. 15 years after school-leaving age just 2 per cent. of graduates are on out-of-work benefits compared with 11 per cent of non-graduates.

Given that the party is keen on work as a route out of poverty and a vehicle for social mobility it seems odd that there is not more embrace of what is still the most powerful route we have to achieve that core Tory ambition.

Saqib Bhatti MP is Shadow Education Minister.  

For years now, anyone who dares to defend the result of the 2016 referendum is met with the same weary refrain: “Brexit made Britain 4 per cent poorer.” It is a claim repeated so often that you would be forgiven for taking it as settled fact. It isn’t.

However, as a beleaguered Keir Starmer looks for ways of shoring up his position and entertaining the ideas of closer and dynamic alignment, we should brace ourselves for Labour Minister after Labour Minister repeating this relentlessly and without mercy.

In truth, the famous “4 per cent GDP hit” is not a measured loss, not an observed collapse, and not proof that Britain “wrecked” its economy by voting Leave. It is a model-based projection — one of several — based on assumptions about what might happen to productivity over the long term. And like any model it can be manipulated.

The “4 per cent poorer” argument depends entirely on a fictional version of Britain — one that stayed in the EU, avoided every global shock, and followed a perfectly smooth pre-2016 trend forever.

That Britain never existed.

If Brexit had truly wiped 4 per cent off the economy, we would expect to see an obvious and permanent collapse in output. That never happened. Britain’s economy didn’t fall off a cliff as was repeated on steroids during the referendum.

UK GDP continued to grow after 2016. Growth slowed at times, but it remained positive across much of the post-referendum period. Even today, official figures from the Office for National Statistics show the economy still expanding, albeit slowly under this anti-business and pro-trade union Chancellor.

That is not what a 4 per cent “loss” looks like. It isn’t real.

What is real is that Britain has shown immense strength and resilience. Since 2016, the UK, like every other major economy, the United Kingdom has been hit by numerous major shocks that have done serious damage to the global economy.

The COVID pandemic effectively brought economies to a halt, forcing governments to spend billions subsidising industries that couldn’t keep going. This, once in a lifetime pandemic, led to a collapse in the global supply chain that and hurt economies across the world. In fact, being out of the European Union helped us deal with the pandemic and get our economy back up and running. It was precisely because we were out of the European Union that we had the fastest vaccine rollout in the world and in Europe. This was despite Starmer protesting at the time that we should follow the European Medical Health Agency. That would have meant longer lockdowns and lower GDP.

Coupled with this, we saw major war in Europe for the first time since 1945. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine caused global instability and saw a surge in the cost of energy. This has pushed up bills for families and businesses which has done nothing for economic growth.

Germany has suffered recession. France has stagnated and President Macron can’t even pass a budget. The idea that Britain’s performance exists in a vacuum is simply false. In fact, The UK economy has outgrown Japan, Germany, Italy and France since 2016. The only thing that has threatened that has been Rachel Reeves and thi

If Brexit had been uniquely catastrophic, Britain would stand out dramatically from comparable economies. It doesn’t.

Now of course, when you have huge constitutional change as we did when we left the European Union there may well have been some short-term cost. But any common-sense analysis of the facts will show it isn’t the 4% drop in GDP that is oft repeated. It is just as likely to be negligible and more likely to be a net positive impact in the long-term. That depends on us. Our future is in our hands.

Brexit reshaped Britain’s trading relationships. It created challenges and opportunities. Reasonable people can debate whether it was the right choice, but pretending that Brexit definitively “destroyed” 4 per cent of GDP is not economics, it’s politics.

Now Keir Starmer’s back is against the wall, pursuing dynamic alignment where the UK ends up being a rule-taker and paying for the privilege is a foolhardy way of buying off his backbenchers. Unfortunately, it won’t work and will leave the UK in a worse off position with unelected bureaucrats once again dictating to us how we should live our lives. No wonder the EU economy commissioner has said this month that the European bloc is ready to engage with “an open mind” when asked about a customs union.

In this context, Keir Starmer’s attacks on Brexit and its impact on the economy are as predictable as they are risible. If we want an honest national conversation about growth, productivity, and our place in the world we must not let Labour politicians use recycled myths to scare the British public into a new settlement with the European Union.

The British public deserve better than that.