With things calming down approaching what in 1980s UK terms used to be called Chrimbo in North Bury (Labour seat turned Tory), I thought I’d share some US-UK cheer in the spirit of Trump, the Brexit salvationist. Your author teaches in a Title 1 school in Hinesville, Georgia, USA. Title 1 offers extra Federal Funding for school’s students disproportionately in poverty. Our school, because Hinesville is an Army base, gets generous federal funding.

Statewide 2015-16, Georgia paid 46% of education spending. The Georgia Department of Education (GaDoe) ranks us on a 100-point scale. We are a 75.3 CCRPI (College and Career Readiness Performance Indexes) school. The average is 77. This, as sometime Lib Dem supporter, Alistair Campbell (campaigning for Luciana Berger) had it, is a ‘bog standard (American) Comprehensive School’.

GaDoe for our school – non-ironically one administrator calls it Godot – reports 55.1% African-American, 66.2% economically disadvantaged, 19.7% white and 14.4% Hispanic students. Last month, waiting for Godot ended: we managed a 2-point CCRPI improvement. CCRPI rank us by complex metrics against unattainable goals.  After a decade here, an achievement given staff churn, your author, teaching 12^th English has some observations.

I notice a vogue for predicting US politics based on the UK’s general election and visa versa. The BBC’s Anthony Zurcher recently asked Does UK hold clues to Trump’s fortunes?. The answer is no. The US has a constitution; the UK does not: well, not a modern, European style written constitution anyway. But that, as so many Brexiters appear to believe, makes the UK better, since “We didn’t lose World War Two” – a bit of an obsession of theirs, no?   “We” didn’t win it either – not without the USA. There won’t be trans-Atlantic salvation this time, whatever Johnson flunkies think. Contrast what I hope will still be in the UK with what has existed here for decades.

If the UK labour movement’s decline has had results for progressive politics (especially the Labour Party), it is reasonable to suppose Georgia’s history of small-scale state government has had educational consequences. This state’s budget in 2020 is $27.5 billion. A total of $10.6 billion of that gets spent on public education. In 2015-16 there were 1,764,215 students in public, 189,630 in private schools, many affluent Atlanta ones. Georgia’s 2019 GDP is $613,105,200 million. So Georgia, a low tax, low service state, spends 1.73% of GDP educating its citizens. According to the OECD, UK education spending in 2016, after austerity, was 4.2%. Our local income tax – we have one, Florida and New Hampshire do not – is 6%, reduced to 5.75% by a Republican governor for 2020, who spent 95% of new budget money giving 114,000 Georgia teachers a $3,000 raise.

Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, whom I didn’t vote for, but who a colleague knows well, believes two things about schoolteachers. As they vote the state goes electorally. His democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, implicated him in vote suppression by among other things purging those who had not voted recently. Second, public school teachers are cheaper than public safety officials (Police, Fire, Highway Patrol, National Guard). Teachers keep hope on life-support in a state with high poverty rates and a criminalized underclass. If you think chlorinated chicken and NHS drugs dangers from closer US alignment, think again. America is no social democracy. There is much to fear from Boris Johnson’s neo-liberal, free trade agenda. Let progressives -Liberal Democrats especially – unite!  It could get a lot worse.

* John David Leaver is a Lib Dem member currently working in the USA