Few, if any, United Kingdom politicians have polarised opinion as sharply as Margaret Thatcher.

A consensus developed in Scotland that her administration was one of unparalleled hostility to the country and met with near-universal unpopularity. Though this myth is partly responsible for the low electoral standing of the Conservative Party north of the Border, as a historical judgment it is not borne out by the facts.

It is not true, though it is frequently claimed, that Conservative support went into terminal decline from the beginning of her time in office.

The Tories increased their vote, to a healthy 31%, and 22 seats, in 1979; remarkably, even with the sharp recession of the early-1980s, they maintained that position in 1983. The main loss came in 1987, when the number of MPs was halved, but even then the party still held 24% of the vote – more than it had obtained in the elections of 1974. At the subsequent election, it increased its standing, adding two MPs.

The really dramatic decline in Conservative support in Scotland dates from John Major's time in charge between 1992 and 1997.

Certainly, Mrs Thatcher's period in office was met with vigorous opposition and marked by strife; no government of the past century was as radically transformative.

The post-war administration led by Clement Attlee, the nearest competitor in terms of the changes it wrought, nonetheless swam with the tide.

Received political wisdom then was that central economic planning, nationalisation, and bureaucratic management were not only desirable, but inevitable.

It was a view maintained even by Conservative regimes from the mid-1930s until Mrs Thatcher became leader. But her instincts – bolstered by then unfashionable economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and think-tanks like the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute – were to reject that consensus.

Her programme of widespread privatisation and economic liberalisation had a profound effect on Britain's economy, and the impact on Scotland, where traditional manufacturing industries were dominant, was especially apparent.

But that upheaval was the result of tackling the Spanish practices that had developed through the 1970s, an assault on inefficiency, rather than industry.

An example of the country's chronic uncompetitiveness is that, at the end of Mrs Thatcher's time in office, British steel production was the same (150,000 tonnes) as it had been in 1979, but was achieved with one-fifth of the workforce. The steelworkers' response to their own industry's losses in the early-1980s, by contrast, was to call a strike demanding a 20% pay rise.

Yet, despite her rhetoric, Mrs Thatcher's government continued to subsidise uneconomic heavy industry, while the Barnett formula brought Scotland a greater degree of support than comparable industrial areas in the north of England. She intervened in 1982 to prevent British Steel from closing the hot strip mill at Ravenscraig (which did not close until after she had been out of office for almost two years).

Before 1979, Scotland's owner-occupancy rate was lower than Communist Czechoslovakia's; most major industries were closed shops; there were three television channels; no effective element of choice in schools, doctor's surgery or utilities supplier; obtaining a (rented) telephone from the sole (nationalised) supplier could take months; no-one could take more than £500 out of the country.

Mrs Thatcher's sweeping away of such, now unthinkable, petty restrictions were met at every stage by opposition from vested interests in business and unions, but were often as popular in Scotland as elsewhere in the UK.

The most pervasive misconception is that the poll tax was "imposed" on Scotland as an experiment before being brought in for England and Wales. In fact, it was adopted as a policy for all of the UK two years before being introduced in Scotland, and Mrs Thatcher was bounced – reluctantly, as she made clear in her memoirs – into its early introduction here by the demands of the Scottish Office.

The proximate cause was the outcry that greeted the rates revaluation of 1985-86; George Younger and Willie Whitelaw assumed the poll tax would be more popular. That thinking was proven comprehensively wrong, but, had Scotland been singled out as a trial run, as is often claimed, it is hard to see why it was then introduced south of the Border.

The imposition of free markets under her government was nowhere near as comprehensive or dogmatic as her ideological opponents liked to maintain, or her supporters might have liked.

She was pragmatic and, for much of her government, restrained by "Wets" in her own party. There was no real reduction in the welfare budget, nor substantial reform of public-sector pension provision. Although income tax levels fell, NHS, education and other public spending continued to rise, albeit at a lower rate

The Thatcher government's principal achievement was to win the argument for liberty and against command economies – a judgment vindicated by the fall of Communism in 1989 – in the face of fierce opposition. That was bound to be especially vocal in Scotland, where the socialist notions she tackled were strongly entrenched.

But, even here, few voices would now call for a return to the status quo ante: the widespread nationalisation, militant unions, ineffectual services and economic mismanagement of the 1970s. Even Alex Salmond admitted it wasn't so much the economics as the personality of Mrs Thatcher that raised Scottish hackles.

Every mainstream political party in the country accepts the necessity of many of the reforms of her time in office.

Those keenest to blame Mrs Thatcher for destroying the welfare state seemed not to pause to consider how a later Conservative-led Coalition government could be accused of destroying it again. In that light, the demonisation of Margaret Thatcher in Scottish political discourse, its peculiar intensity, and its strongly personalised nature seems even more irrational.