Keir Starmer's "Juridificated" Politics

Jamie M. Johnson, Owen D. Thomas & Victoria M. Basham recently published an interesting article in the journal British Politics discussing Keir Starmer's politics as representing a "juridification" of politics. By that term they mean that it reduces government to mere administration. That is to say that it treats questions of more fundamental policy, their premises, their social bases as either nonexistent or meaningless--an approach the authors identify with a neoliberalism whose proponents have always argued "There Is No Alternative," and with the claims for this being a post-historical, post-ideological era in which all the big questions have been settled, the apparatus for running the world essentially in place, and all that remains its operation in a sound manner. In line with this Labour in opposition under Starmer criticized the government on grounds of "probity" and "competence"--its failing to adhere to "the rules"--and promised that under a Labour government Britain would get not a radical alternative, but "the continuation of Conservative policy, albeit implemented in a more honest and efficient manner." All of this, of course, is further affirmed by Starmer's ceaseless display of contempt for those who desire anything else from a Labour government--from his "I don't care" response to the objection that his policy is conservative, to his expression of disdain of "ideological purity."

In the process of Johnson et. al.'s argument for their position they give the impression that if Starmer can seem to have pragmatically acknowledged that 2024 is not 1997 in his rhetoric and even his policy promises down to his party's current General Election Manifesto, on a deeper level for Starmer the 1990s never ended. He is certainly not alone in this delusion, which can seem to be astonishingly persistent among centrist neoliberals of Starmer's type--but the thought is still not a happy one for anyone who understands just how much the world's path has diverged from what was expected by neoliberal utopians back in what George Friedman and Meredith LeBard called "the giddy springtime of the bourgeoisie."