Before becoming Prime Minister, David Cameron had many good things to say about marriage and the family. Since becoming PM, however, he has been disappointing in this regard. It is said this is because his Chancellor doesn’t care whether marriage is promoted or not, and his coalition partner, Nick Clegg is actively hostile.

In any case, political commentator, Peter Oborne has written a trenchant piece in today’s Daily Telegraph attacking the liberal/left establishment in Britain over its hostility to marriage and the family he takes Cameron to task for so far failing to act on his pro-marriage election promises.

There is a particularly apposite quote in the article which caught my eye and which exactly sums up the attitude of political elites all across the Western world towards the family: “Our problem now is to do away with the household and to free women from the care of children”.

Who said this? Some apparatchik from the European Commission? No, the quote is from a certain Anatoly Lunacharsky (pictured) who was Lenin’s Soviet People’s Commissar of Enlightenment responsible for culture and education. (What a job title! He was also, incidentally, an art critic and journalist).

His philosophy, “to free women from the care of children”, fits extremely well with many Western countries today. Sweden, for example, practically conscripts women into work once their children reach the age of one. The children are conscripted into day-care.

Irish social policy is increasingly moving in this direction also, at the behest of the likes of the IMF, the OECD and the European Commission. It still has a long way to go, thank goodness.

However, it is interesting how an agenda which first reared its head immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution is now the stuff of mainstream politics in the West and even parties that were formerly pro-family have succumbed to it so readily.