Brian Micklethwait on my colleague, Cobden Centre Chairman, Toby Baxendale:
…You don’t get from seventy grand in debt at the age of twenty one to running a company that turns over a hundred million quid a year before you are even properly middle aged without having something about you.
…
The thing I find particularly intriguing about Toby is how his thinking in the academic sense and his business and social thinking are so deeply intertwined, which is sadly not true of far too many businessmen. His early acquaintance with the economic facts of life, due to his parents divorcing early and him being raised by his single mother, meant that he came to the study of economics with a well developed sense of how the economy worked and how wealth gets created, and regular economics didn’t add up. Too abstract. Simply: not right. He paid for much of this education by himself working, first by part-owning and running a night club, then by buying food for a restaurant that he part-owned, the latter activity being the basis of his later business success…
Toby is a remarkable man and I am proud to have been instrumental in establishing the educational charity he founded to promote honest money, free trade and peace in the tradition of that great statesman, Richard Cobden.
