The Labour Party has been in power for the past 13 years in the UK. What is its legacy in education? What have been the salient aspects of its policy interventions, and what impact have these policies had on the practice of English teachers? With its assumption of a straightforward correlation between education and economic development, New Labour's education policy needs to be seen primarily as a failure of politics--an abandonment of any commitment to social justice in pursuit of a standards agenda that reduces teachers to a condition of mere compliance and education to a set of commodities.