The British Labour Party, after fourteen years in the electoral wilderness, looks likely to finally return to power this year. 2024, in an almost serendipitous act of historical symmetry, is also the one-hundredth anniversary of the Labour Party first gaining office under the leadership of Ramsay MacDonald. When MacDonald won a minority for Labour in 1924, the party was an unknown quantity for much of the British public, untested, inexperienced, and uncertain in its vision of the political good.

One hundred years later, the same could be said of Labour under its current leadership. After more than a decade out of power, many younger voters have no political memory of the party’s fourteen-year tenure in government between 1997 and 2010. Then, Tony Blair’s government rode on a wave of economic growth and financial liberalization to fund a welfare state transformed into a cash transfer program. The building of social housing did not return to postwar levels and the party did not repeal anti–trade union laws, but it did redistribute a growing pie to fund public services. An effort to restore social democracy without the compromises of the Blair years and with a more restrained foreign policy was the defining feature of Jeremy Corbyn’s five years as leader of the opposition.

Starmer, who is likely to be Britain’s next prime minister, has often cast himself as a pragmatist modeled on Blair. But the politics of the two men, as well as the circumstances they confront, differ significantly. Whereas Blair, enamored by confused ideas about remaking socialism for a nonideological age, offered an ambitious vision for how to rewrite the social contract in accordance with neoliberal dogmas, Starmer’s politics have been defined by an oblique political quietism that opts out of the definitive missions of his predecessors Corbyn and Blair.