Top British comedian Steeve Coogan used the imagery of the fasces as he attempted to promote the concept of the co-operative movement, while simultaneously claiming the northern working class are being “ethnically cleansed” yet decrying the “racism” of Nigel Farage.
Earnest but naïve attempt to talk politics, or using the hosts of live breakfast television as the foil for oblique jokes? British comedian Steve Coogan raised eyebrows on Friday morning when he invoked fascist imagery while ostensibly promoting a pet social movement to the nation.
Describing his perspective on the importance of housing co-operatives to protect renters from predatory landlords, Coogan said: “The problem with all these cities like Liverpool and Manchester is they’ve got all these big shiny buildings. But all the people who are disenfranchised have been ethnically cleansed from the area. They don’t actually benefit”.
Coogan also invoked familiar and long-established political imagery while criticising a rent-seeking group in the form of big landlords. He said first: “…the government can’t solve all our problems. If you empower these property movements, we’re effectively saying get big business and commerce to take their foot off the neck of working people”.
More explicitly, describing the fasces itself — the central analogy of fascism — he continued: “when you act as individuals, you have no power. If you’ve got cockroaches and damp in your house, awful conditions, as an individual you might as well shout into the void and get no response. But if you belong to an organisation where you have a group of people by the power of numbers… basically you can break one stick, but you get a bundle of sticks tied together, you can’t break them”.
Coogan, who has made a comfortable living out of lampooning right-wing Middle England and their ways as inept, hapless, parochial, and tactless — although gently enough for his best-known Alan Partridge character to have become a “national treasure” and comedic favourite of its very target, middle-age middle-class white men — is reliably left-wing in his own views. In recent years he has backed Jeremy Corbyn, formerly of the Labour Party’s hard-left wing and in the process of launching a new start-up party of his own, supported the hard-left Green Party, and the Palestinian cause.
Ironically, on Friday morning Coogan took several swipes at Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, accurately describing their appeal and reasons for voters departing Labour to support their cause before nevertheless decrying them as politically unacceptable, noting “racist rhetoric”.
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