Don't confuse me with the facts

The Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith (IDS, or, as Jeremy Hardy entertainingly calls him, Irritable Duncan Syndrome), has this wonderful insight in the Telegraph today:

[Duncan Smith] said that Labour’s failure to help British unemployed people compete for and win jobs had fuelled immigration in recent years.
The last 13 years saw the number of people in employment increase by 2.5 million, he said. Yet today there are around 5 million people on out-of-work benefits.
“So who took all the new jobs? Over half of them went to foreign nationals. This isn’t about immigration. It is a simple question of supply and demand,” he said.
“We had a supply of labour – the unemployed. We had a demand for labour – all the new jobs. But we couldn’t match them up, so we had to import people who could do the work.”

Never mind that all the way back in 2004 the Centre for Economic Policy Research found that "Research for the US and other European countries finds, with very few exceptions, modest or zero effects of immigration on employment and wages of residents."

It is, of course, easier to scapegoat immigrants than to deal with the structural economic problems leading to such high unemployment. But then, did we expect anything less from the Tories?