Among her other legacies, the development of a large wealth management sector in the UK must count as important consequence of the changes wrought by Margaret Thatcher.

Many words have been, and will be, written about the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, who died yesterday at the age of 87. Among the many aspects of her political career has been her association in the public mind with a particular form of free market economics, and specifically, with the rise of London as a global financial centre. It is with this “wealth management” aspect in mind that I want to make a few points.

The wealth management industry owes some of its present prominence to the grocer’s daughter from Lincolnshire who, in a male-dominated Conservative Party, rose to be the first – and so far, only – woman to hold the post of prime minister (1979-1990). Her time in office saw the rise of “shareholder democracy” and the encouragement of home ownership and entrepreneurship. More broadly, the late Baroness Thatcher – or “Maggie” as she was often called by friends and foes alike – was an enthusiast for wealth creation. She championed entrepreneurs and builders of new businesses, presenting a very different kind of Tory message to that older, more paternalistic one of some of her forebears. Unlike them, she did not regard the status of Big Government and socialism as immovable. For that reason, Margaret Thatcher’s political philosophy resonated quite as much in the newly-growing regions of China and India as it did in Britain. (The fact that Hong Kong, even after the 1997 handover from the UK to China, remains one of the great free market hubs of the world would have given her much satisfaction.)

She championed tax cuts, particularly to marginal rates, on income and capital gains. This was crucial. Under her finance ministers Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, the top rate of income tax was slashed from an unbelievable level of 83 per cent (on labour income) to 40 per cent by the late 1980s. (There was an also the appalling old 90-plus per cent tax on "unearned" income.) Although the top rate briefly rose again to 50 per cent under the recent Labour administration of Gordon Brown, it has been since cut back to 45 per cent by the current coalition government. Such tax cuts, it is argued, fostered a less egalitarian Britain – they also were associated with a more entrepreneurial one, as people were able to contemplate starting and running a business without fearing state confiscation. A new generation of self-made men and women became millionaires, and the wealth management industry, once seen as a stuffy preserve of those who inherited money, gradually evolved to serve a new class of business owners. It is perhaps symbolic that Coutts, known as “The Queen’s bank” due to its bank account for Queen Elizabeth II, has developed new client segments to cater, among others, to entrepreneurs as a distinct category. Other firms have done the same. It is hard to speak to wealth managers these days without hearing of their strategies to reach out to "new sources of wealth". "Maggie" would have understood.

The rise of the UK as a wealth management centre has also been driven by changes such as the abolition of exchange controls at the outset of Margaret Thatcher’s administration. With the benefit of hindsight, this was a hugely significant move, happening at a time when the old Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate regime, and tie to gold, had ended. The UK has become a far more international place; one of Margaret Thatcher’s legacies may be that London is home to businessmen and women from all over the world, and it has an expensive luxury property market to go with it. The former prime minister liked to point out how English is the lingua franca of international business, and the Anglo-Saxon Common Law legal system is also important. The role of the UK in developing the notion of trusts, for example, would have been well understood by her. (She trained as a barrister.)

Of course, the Thatcher administration also witnessed the key set of deregulations to the London financial markets in the mid-1980s that are collectively known as the “Big Bang”. Foreign-owned banks flocked to London; capital markets became sharply more competitive. It was also a period associated with excess as well as success. And the old, restricted bank lending culture was gradually replaced with a looser one. Venture capitalism, a term that might have sounded weird in the strike-hit Britain of the 1970s, developed. Buccaneering figures such as Richard Branson became front-page figures. It became “cool” to be a business leader. A more bracing culture replaced that of an older, more rule-bound country. Soon, everyone seemed to have a credit card, and often went over the limit. It is arguable that some of the excesses associated with the financial crash of 2008 had their origins in these changes, although the sheer complexity of the factors at work, such as the role of credit agencies, securitisation and central bank policies might make such a judgement unfair. (It is, for example, difficult to see how Mrs Thatcher would have approved of some of the low interest rates and foolish mortgage lending in the years up to 2008.) With her “Victorian” insistence on thrift and hatred of inflation, Mrs Thatcher might have championed reform measures aimed at returning the world to “honest banking”, stricter reserve requirements and an end to “too big to fail” bailouts. A close reading of her political career reveals she was less of a simple ideologue than is sometimes supposed.

All in all, I can only scratch the surface here of what, by any standards, was a momentous political career that has had huge influence here and around the world, and in my opinion, largely for the better. Given the current agonies of the eurozone, her scepticism about that whole project's viability now looks more prescient by the day. While my own assessment of “Maggie” will inevitably be coloured by my own political opinions (I am what they call a free market classical liberal), she fully deserves to be treated as one of the most remarkable political figures of the second half of the 20^th Century.