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

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.