The Duchess came out last year and the plot of the movie seemed to be about some young lady in the 18th century who wears nice frocks and marries some member of the landed gentry and gets upset because she is meant to have babies and he is in charge.

A female friend found all this quite moving, and I must admit I found, not so much the movie itself (which I have no intention of seeing), but rather the reaction to it a bit annoying.

I couldn’t really pin down my basis of my feelings until I saw an article in the Washington Post: Michael Dirda on ‘Mrs. Woolf and the Servants’. A room of one’s own — and someone to clean it. The book examines the relationship between Virginia Woolfe and her servant. Yes she had a number of female servants. Woolfe was a feminist for herself but happy to receive servitude from her fellow women.

!8th century society was established on class based oppression. The life of some frocked minor royal was irrelevant in that system of oppression. In fact she was far, far better off than most; due to her wealth. If she really cared about oppression she would have been campaigning for the working class poor and not for herself on minor issue (gee, her husband had a mistress, how terrible for her, as she sits in her silk gown eating strawberries).

With the global financial crisis the left blogosphere has been chattering about how this event is a defeat for neoliberalism, and a opportunity for the rise of left policies.

The problem I see is the framing of these new policies of the left.

In a discussion on bloggingheads.tv, the US reporter Christopher Hayes was discussing what he thought were the policies that were opening up for the left, and Eli Lake pointed out that what he was describing was traditional Keynesian and social democratic policies.

It just seems to me to be that an appeal to old 1930′s style policies is not the best way to progress the left agenda. Obviously there are no new policies under the sun, but if the left is to sell its policies isn’t it going to have to repackage and resell them in a modern and relevant form?

It has been pointed out to me that is some way this is what Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ was, and I think that this gives us a good pointer to how the left needs to package and market a market policies.