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oby Baxendale’s life has followed the perfect arc from difficult beginnings to brilliant success. From a council-house, single-parent upbringing in West London he fought to acquire an education that the comprehensive system wouldn’t afford him. With his father’s assistance, he went to a Quaker school where he learned intellectual rigour and the elements of classical liberal thinking. He won a place at the LSE, only to have his heart and mind pulled by the sight of pretty girls on the King’s Road. With characteristic directness and determination, he found a way into the world of the pretty things by buying a night club, juggling his career as king of the Chelsea night with the demands of running a business and getting a degree.
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Inevitably, he lost as often as he won as he clambered up the slippery steps of success. A restaurant disaster nearly forced him into bankruptcy, but for a sympathetic hearing from his bankers, to whom he pledged redemption if they would allow him to trade his way out of their debt via a new business, selling fresh fish and seafood to restaurants. He built this business over the next two decades until it became the country’s biggest seafood supplier. He sold it at the end of 2010 for £45m.
That is the highly-compressed narrative of Toby Baxendale’s life. What it does not describe is the flowering of his philosophical interior over those years. In the playground of the comprehensive school he attended in Chiswick, he witnessed what he calls the ‘grinding down’ of the pupils by the educational system and felt himself being ground down too. The move to the Quaker School spurred not only his intellect but his free market entrepreneurialism; he made profits from selling booze and fags to his peers. But a seed was being planted, one that would grow when he studied for his A Levels at Hammersmith and West London College, what he describes as a radical left wing college. He took great delight in founding the college chapter of the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS), to the horror of his right-on teachers.
It was the great political events of the 1980s that really shaped his thinking: the 1984 miners’ strike, in which he saw a well-organised (if badly-led) group of workers demand that the country beggar itself in order to keep them in work; the union wars over the Today newspaper, in which a visionary entrepreneur, Eddie Shah, saw a way to create a newspaper using new technology, to the fury of the union vested interests. This of course was followed by Rupert Murdoch’s union-busting move to Wapping and the battles that were fought at his factory gates. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the ultimate failure of socialism accelerated his drive towards becoming a natural rights/ natural law radical. The liberal seed that had been planted at his Quaker School ultimately found its economic expression
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in the writings of Freidrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, the founder of the Austrian School of Economics.
Fast forward to today. He is a millionaire many times over after selling his business Direct Seafoods last December. But even before he left the business he was planning his next move. He established the Cobden Centre (www.
cobdencentre.org.uk), a think tank named after the great free trader and liberal thinker Richard Cobden (1804-1865). (Its aim: ‘to promote social progress through honest money, free trade and peace’). Toby has also endowed the Hayek Chair at the LSE and is an ambassador for the Opportunity Trust, which provides microfinance loans to stimulate entrepreneurship and self-help in developing countries. On top of all this he is a magistrate, fulfilling what he believes are the duties of every citizen to give something to the community in which they live.
But it is in the work of the Cobden Centre, with its commitment to sound money, that his main mission lies. He believes there is corruption at the heart of our money supply, a devil’s pact between the banking system and governments that beggars the poor to enrich the elite.
BF: What is money to you?
TB: Money is the representation of the efforts of our labour. Any surplus money we accumulate, our savings, represents goods and services we have yet to buy, either today or in the future, perhaps when we retire. If you accept that basic premise, then it follows that when money is controlled by a central bank that can mint money into existence overnight through running the printing presses or quantitative easing, the value of your labour is being attacked by the inflation they are creating.. Your honest toil to supply your family with the necessities of life is being debased. If a counterfeiter paid you in money he’d actually made, you’d feel as if you’d been robbed, but when the government or banks do it, you grudgingly accept it. So the very basis of the system is corrupt.
BF: ‘Twas ever thus, surely?
TB: True, but historically, money was a commodity and it was a lot harder for even despotic old villains like Henry VIII to steal our purchasing power. Coinage was debased, of course, but it wasn’t even on the Richter Scale when it comes to what happens in modern times. Robbers like Dick Turpin demanding ‘Your money or your life!’ were far more honest in their intent than politicians who promise jam today, jam tomorrow and it’ll cost you nothing.
BF: So how did we get here from there?
TB: Kings and despots have always needed money to fund their lifestyles and their wars. Charles I was the first modern ‘monarch thief'. He was always short of money to fight his wars and imposed a series of very unpopular taxes. (continued overleaf)
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