‘Mr Rules’: Keir Starmer and the juridification of politics

Johnson, Jamie, Thomas, Owen and Basham, Victoria ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8829-5119 2024. ‘Mr Rules’: Keir Starmer and the juridification of politics. British Politics 10.1057/s41293-024-00258-1

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Abstract

Keir Starmer’s moniker of ‘Mr Rules’ captures his deep investment in a rules-based form of politics that seeks to uphold established standards of probity and competency in public office. Rather than a mere tactic of opposition politics, we argue that it is symptomatic of the juridification of politics. By this we mean the ceding of the terrain of politics to the seemingly superior and separate domains of law and administration. Drawing upon and extending existing analyses of depoliticisation and unpolitics, the juridification of politics marks the abandonment of consciously values-based politics in favour of a reliance upon legal and quasi-legal (i.e. rules, norms, conventions, procedures) means to address substantive matters of public policy. Crucially, we locate this trend as a consequence of the neoliberal way of politics in which the task of governing in a post-ideological age is reduced to administration. This is significant, we conclude, because such an approach is incapable of responding to the intersecting crises confronting national and international politics.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Cardiff Law & Politics
Subjects:	J Political Science > JA Political science (General) J Political Science > JF Political institutions (General) J Political Science > JZ International relations
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
ISSN:	1746-918X
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	17 April 2024
Date of Acceptance:	11 April 2024
Last Modified:	28 May 2024 11:05
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/168133

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