Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor, has compared the unemployed victims of his economic policies to the casualties of war in a Cambridge speech this week.

Speaking at a Cambridge University History Society (CLIO)  seminar held last Monday at the Cambridge Union, Lord Lawson of Blaby, whilst admitting that the extent of the rise in unemployment figures had shocked him, nevertheless defended his decisions as the inevitable means of escape for an economy in serial decline.

These words came in the context of a discussion with Will Hutton, the left-leaning former Editor-in-Chief of the Observer, and Professor Richard Vinen, an expert on Thatcherism from King’s College, London.

For all the austerity of the venue, the sparks flew between the speakers on occasion. When Professor Vinen attacked the Conservative government of the 1980s, claiming that one million unemployed was incompetence, but two million was a policy, Lord Lawson retorted that his speech had borne no relation to reality.

For his part, Will Hutton, while supporting Lawson’s argument that major structural changes were inescapable for the British economy, attempted to draw the discussion into the social consequences of Thatcherism by criticising the enormous damage done to UK industrial cities.

The President of CLIO, Harry Dadswell, told Varsity of his delight at the event. “No one was expecting such a high turnout to the event: it gave the proceedings a real sense of excitement. It was fantastic to see Lord Lawson, a maker of history, forced by the fellow speakers to justify his actions before students, many of whom have written weekly history essays on the actions this man took only three decades ago.”

The fact remains, however, that the description of the British unemployed, which topped three million in 1982, as necessary casualties of war in a necessary economic transition, will certainly provoke comment as long as the legacy of Thatcher remains a contentious issue.