The Mad Mullahs of Postliberalism

Do the new traditionalists understand the country they claim to love?

‘Postliberalism’ covers a broad group of whingers and doom-merchants, and whilst they all have slightly different theses on the root of Britain’s decline there is a common theme that our country has been destroyed by its embrace of individualistic, universal values, and lost sight of its particular traditions and historical ways of life as a result.

They paint a picture of a country that has become corrupt and impure. Some have even taken to referring to Britain as ‘porn island’: in fact, the tendency in general seems very fixated on pornography, OnlyFans, debauched women – all caused, at root, by the inherent failures of ‘liberalism’. They suggest our society has become hollowed out, our communities unable to sustain themselves under market-driven individualism and technocratic governance. They identify problems such as the ‘suppression’ of religion, ‘atomisation’, ‘alienation’, and the worship of wealth and productivity – which they suggest is prioritised above all other goals. Above all, they believe that Britain is not really British any more.

Given the embrace of postliberalism’s newest, more explicitly religious form by various Lotus-Eaters-esque commentators, it’s worth thinking a little more deeply about these critiques. I’ll be honest and admit that I often struggle to distinguish between the various characters of the Lotus Eaters Cinematic Universe – partly because ‘the one with the Topman suit, the polyester tie and pocket handkerchief set, and the affected “new decorum” accent’ doesn’t exactly narrow it down. Not being a regular viewer, perhaps I have dedicated insufficient attention to the task.

Nevertheless, Connor Tomlinson’s notable commitment to seeking attention makes him as good a representative as any for this subset. Only a few years ago, Tomlinson was a fairly by-the-book classical liberal arguing against lockdowns. Since then, his views have undergone a transformation as significant as his accent. Out has gone the everyman arguing against encroachments on civil liberties; in has come a muscular theo-politics and a liberal advocacy for banning that which raises his ire.

The odd thing about these new ideological impulses is that they are built upon ‘the politics of place’; shot through with the language of ‘citizens of nowhere about the loss of national identity at the hands of globalisation and free trade – a descent into a grey, homogenous global monoculture. They advocate, above anything else, a particular politics built on the specificities of British culture and history. And yet, something about their critiques sounds… just not quite right. They are reminiscent less of the voices of Drake and Nelson echoing through the ages, or even of the issues facing the bin-man from Bromley, than of the disavowals one might expect to hear from the kind of preacher in a flat-roofed mosque with a harsh Brummie accent that the BBC and Channel 4 like to wheel out for a vox pop.

There is a doctrine – well known amongst the more conspiratorial corners of the right – in Islam called “Taquiyya” - “Believers should not take disbelievers as guardians instead of the believers - and whoever does so will have nothing to hope for from Allah - unless it is a precaution against their tyranny. And Allah warns you about Himself. And to Allah is the final return.” It refers to a Muslim concealing their faith or religious identity to protect themselves from danger or to advance their religious cause (interpretations vary).

We wouldn’t be fulfilling our journalistic responsibilities, then, if we failed to enquire: is Connor Tomlinson a crypto-Muslim?

There are certainly some slips and tells that might suggest his zeal for theocracy under the banner of Christianity is built on some fairly fruity foundations. A recent livestream from Tomlinson was titled “Who’s Afraid Of The Online Right?”. I don’t know the answer to that question, because the stream was a mind-numbing two hours of sincere holier-than-though priggishness interspersed with regular repetitions of in-group catechisms (‘you can just do things!’). However, amongst Tomlinson’s esprit d’escalier is the following statement:

“[Christianity] informs all of my politics, it informs all of my relationships. It is my morality. And morality does not exist outside of doing things with other people. You can’t be moral on a desert island because there is nobody to be on the receiving end of your treatment of them.”

It’s part of a longer rant about the inalienable Christianity of Britain, and Britishness. It’s an odd claim all around. To start with, it is what theologians refer to as ‘absolute bollocks’. The idea that morality is an interpersonal phenomenon is a refutation of Christianity. Christianity. The Temptation of Christ in the desert was not a performative act for His mates. It espouses the very opposite of the worldview of Tomlinson; quite literally sending the message that morality, sin, and temptation matter even when you think that nobody is watching.

As a profession of faith, then, this is the kind of thing that would set alarm bells ringing even in the ears of the most egregiously liberal Anglican vicars as they gleefully rubber-stamp asylum claims from dinghy-enjoyers fleeing ‘religious persecution’ in their desert homelands. Nevertheless, it does not exactly bolster a positive response to my largely unfounded question: ‘is Connor Tomlinson practising taqiyya to impose an Islamic moral framework on Britain?’. The Qur’an is also a bit of a stickler for the notion that moral authority is derived from Allah alone, rather than what Connor Tomlinson gets up to with his chums when the lights are off and nobody is watching.

This somewhat shaky understanding of the Christian faith might not be worth bringing up, were it not for the zealotry and hectoring tone of these people, but it chafes somewhat that those that would like to impose faith by the force of the state – explicitly in order to return Britain to its true ancestral traditions – have Afghan goat farmer handed a Kalashnikov levels of understanding of the religion that they want enforcing.

In the epistle of David Allan Coe to Steve Goodman, he tells him that he hadn’t written the perfect country and western song: “Because he hadn’t said anything at all about Mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or gettin’ drunk” and it’s a bit hard not to feel a very strong sense of that when listening to the new traditionalists speak. There’s a lot of talk about Christian culture; of England being a country that will crumble without it. There is a lot about what would be proscribed, what is wicked; and there is the frequent deployment of vague Christian cultural ideas as a stick with which to beat political opponents, but they haven’t said anything at all about Jesus Christ, about redemption, about salvation, or about goodness to one’s fellow man.

Indeed, there’s not much talk either of what being a Christian country has historically meant to Britain in particular. Our country has been home to diverse religious traditions, and it is by no means clear that any one of these is the authentic British rite. We did indeed have a period, approximately correlating with the Victorian age, during which religiosity had a highly public character and political leaders motivated by Christian faith sought to wield public policy in its name – Gladstone’s imposition of the Licensing Act 1872 being an obvious example.

This, however, was only a brief period of piety for a country which throughout the previous several centuries was renowned across Europe for its piratical, mercantile, and amoral character. The act itself was far from a representation of popular sentiment – its unpopularity was so great as to provoke riots when it first came into force. This ahistoricism is perhaps less surprising when one realises that whilst Tomlinson is, admittedly, probably not a secret Mohammedan, he, like most of the modern traditionalists, is a far older kind of subversive - a Papist! A Christian country we may be, but any defender of the English tradition in the last four hundred years would regard our ecclesiastical independence as its most fundamental cornerstone.

This discussion brings us slightly meanderingly, but not entirely illogically, to another prominent postliberal figure, inclusion of whom in this article has, I promise, a point beyond merely crowbaring in another Pimlico Journal bête noire out of malice. Philip Pilkington is a macroeconomist and financial services professional. We know this is true because he tells us it is. I’m treading carefully here, because Pilkington has a bit of a habit of threatening people with the army of lawyers at his beck and call. He can afford these lawyers as a result of being a successful and well-renowned economist.

Despite this fact, Pilkington has a somewhat home-grown understanding of his field of study, perhaps best summarised in his own words from his book, humbly titled ‘The Reformation in Economics: A Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Economic Theory’ (386pp, Palgrave Macmillian, available from all good globalist e-commerce vendors):

“We can perhaps summarise the cardinal rule of good economics in a single sentence: good macroeconomics does not make strong assumptions about how people behave. As far as possible, good macroeconomics should avoid altogether trying to describe the behaviour of people in any but the most abstract sense; motivations should be largely a secondary question and should only be raised when it is absolutely necessary.”

Now – and I promised there was a point here – this is a statement with many similarities to Connor Tomlinson’s cited earlier. Explicitly rejecting marginalism out of hand, as well as relegating attempts to investigate the behaviour or motivations of agents to a secondary priority if they are to be pursued at all, somewhat undermines the claim to faith in economics, much like Tomlinson’s undermines his claim to faith in Christ. Ironically, Pilkington’s embrace of the meaningfulness of statistical correlations between aggregates reminds me of the saying that ‘you might not believe in Jesus Christ, but Jesus Christ believes in you’. He might not believe in the extremely mainstream and near-universally accepted theory of marginalism, but the extremely mainstream and near-universally accepted theory of marginalism believes in Philip Pilkington, macroeconomist and financial services professional.

But the Pilk’s rejection of key principles in economics doesn’t stop there. Capital mobility, exchange rate dynamics, arbitrage, economic interdependence. Scroll through a single day’s worth of market commentary waffle from the Emerald Isle Sage, and you’ll find a full pot of gold’s worth of economic concepts that he fails to understand. There are perhaps two explanations - and taqiyya raises its head once more. The first is that Philip Pilkington is ignorant of the majority of the western canon of economics because he did all of his studying in the caves of Afghanistan. The second is that he is an idiot.

Editor’s note: (Given Mr Pilkington’s aforementioned love of threatening litigation, Pimlico Journal would like to state in the clearest possible terms that it doesn’t believe that he trained in the caves of Afghanistan.)

So given that he is a completely uninteresting economist, why bring him up? I refer you to my original thesis. Pilkington has much in common with the Lotus Eater traditionalists – and, like them, his critiques of modern Britian are eerily reminiscent of Islamic opposition to Western female liberation. Specifically, he is utterly obsessed by the idea that all white British women are producing pornography. Honestly, it never stops. On and on and on and on and on. No man on the internet is more obsessed by OnlyFans. Even when he’s trying to deconstruct the usefulness of GDP, he manages to make it about pornography. If I didn’t know that some poor bastard is going to have to check all these links whilst editing this article, I’d go on for another page listing examples of his mania.

Compared to Connor Tomlinson, whose opposition to women’s liberation seems heavily focussed on them using Microsoft Excel at work (he really doesn’t like Excel), Pilkington’s obsessions come from a much darker place – not least in his perpetuation of the libel that as many as 4% of British women have active OnlyFans accounts. Pimlico Journal contributors Henry Reynolds Skelton and Lao Cai Larry have addressed some of these weird attacks on British women in an excellent article here, but we must still ask ourselves how these people – who position themselves as defenders and revivors of the True British Nation – manage to get the country they supposedly love so wrong.

My taqiyya thesis, I admit, is mostly a fun accusation to level at some deeply humourless people (if you do it on your next department-wide Teams call, let us know how it goes), but the parallels between the neotraditionalist and Islamic critiques of Western society are worth dwelling on. Through the latter, we have examples where sections of society in Britain have indeed been reordered along religious lines; where the supposed excesses of capitalism are reined in by restrictions on finance and commerce and regulations on how the fruits of those transactions should be shared. It’s worth dwelling on whether the general objection to this thoroughly postliberal ‘Retvrn to Traditional Values’ is based on a disagreement over the Godliness of Isa, born of Maryam, or whether it is because they do not like the idea of liberties being constrained in such a way on British soil in 2025.

There’s another, less philosophical, source of uncanny foreignness to the postliberal discourse in the frequent projections of foreign domestic issues onto Britain. In Pilkington’s case, this is often down to the fact that he is a lunatic, but it’s also worth bearing in mind that he left London (the capital city of ‘The Yookay’ which, he informs us, is ‘finished’; ‘over’; ‘a delusional bubble that is about to pop’) to work as a researcher for the Danube Institute in Budapest, and that the government of Viktor Orbán has long had a successful strategy of attracting conservative bloggers and YouTubers to embrace his message of postliberal conservatism. In the context of Hungary, or of Poland, or of any number of countries that still bear the scars of communism, it is perfectly normal to talk about reclaiming a Christianity that had been suppressed by the state. Similarly, the fears over the commoditisation of the individual feel a little more substantial in a country that has not enjoyed the benefits of wealth to the extent that Britain or other Atlantic countries have.

These really aren’t the issues facing Britain in 2025. The decline of churchgoing throughout the twentieth century had nothing to do, here, with state opposition. Long before the mass immigration of non-Christians, and before the War on Christmas began, Britain had drifted into an at-best high days and holidays attitude towards church attendance. I wish Hungary well, but the challenges of transforming Britain from a $56k nominal GDP per capita country with shoddy law enforcement and a broken housing market to a $70k nominal GDP per capita country with safe streets and plentiful, affordable townhouses are simply not the same as the challenges facing a country left behind by Western economic development trying to claw its way into the twenty-first century and maintain some sense of identity in the face of a globalised culture which operates in our language, not theirs.

Britain doesn’t need to struggle with an identity crisis in the face of Western capitalism. We are not the meek Shire people ripped from our agrarian existence by the cruel dogmas of Maggie Thatcher that trads like to suggest. We are the Anglo-Saxons: we invented modern capitalism, markets, industry, and corporations. Half a millennium ago, we were able to build some of the greatest churches in Europe not despite this, but because of the wool profits that came about as a result of our embrace of privatisation, technology, and trade. We were unsentimental, and we marched forwards. Trade and progress, not Catholic clericism, made us what we are.

Similarly, if you’re ever tempted to prattle about ‘Atomisation’ because you heard about it at a conference in Eastern Europe, you will find little buy in from the median Brit, who would view it as a rather alien concept. This is a difficult pill to swallow for some, but far from being a gormless peon floating around in meaningless existence, waiting to be saved by the wisdom of the Lotus Eaters podcast, most people are actually living fairly well-rounded lives. They have a job they don’t hate but which doesn’t overly define them, they go for drinks with friends after work, they help out at their kid’s cricket team in the summer and football team in the winter because that’s what their dads did for them. They believe in marriage and family and monogamy, but they are aware that man is fallen and not without sin. Sometimes, things go wrong, and relationships fall apart – you should feel bad about that, and you should sincerely repent if you were at fault, but heaven does not exist on earth. Going for a nice walk in the countryside with the dog wasn’t invented by Barbour Nationalism in March 2025. Most people ‘just do things’.

What always needs to be borne in mind throughout postliberal criticisms of Britain, and “London has fallen”-ism, is that it is, for the most part, hysterical nonsense and projection. That a second year analyst with a journalism degree was unable to make his millions, and instead become a stipendiary researcher in Budapest, is not the death knell for London as a global financial hub. Similarly, in a perfect world, podcasters would be sufficiently financially secure that they did not feel they needed to rage against women having jobs that required the use of Microsoft Excel. But their inability to generate sufficient wealth from a hobby with close to zero barriers to entry is no reason to impose theocratic socialism on the country to spite girls that earn a living from knowing how to use VLOOKUP.

To get bogged down in neuroses about social mores and to think that state intervention in governing morality is going to either reap material rewards or get buy-in from an electorate is just a distraction. Tony Blair was many things, but he understood that if you’re going to be in the business of banning things (and I don’t think that you should), you should do it when you have 5 percent GDP growth.

Britain has many problems, and much of Pimlico Journal’s output involves being honest about those problems. Lots of them are very big – but most of them are far more straightforward than grappling with faith, sin, and salvation. They come down to the fact that the state is very big, the productive part of the economy is very small, and both bear the weight of an increasingly engorged parasite class (both foreign and domestic). There really is no need to complicate things, or to engineer unnecessary complexity into the business of making the British safe, happy, and prosperous.

The British constitution gives parliament enormous, near unchecked powers to make vast changes if a political party is elected with a sufficient mandate. Removing many or all of the huge economic pull factors that attract foreign nationals wishing to live a life subsidised by the British taxpayer. Reforming the preposterous social housing system, and selling off most of the stock. Building industries of the future whilst abolishing the culture of compliance strangling Britain’s financial services. All of this is within our grasp. In short, we should remove the shackles of the state preventing the Anglo-Saxon from doing what he does best – which he has not, in fact, forgotten. As for the revival of church attendance, I’m afraid that’s on the Church.

Put the porn away, Philip. There’s work to be done.

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This article was written by Frank Cabernet, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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