Must try harder?

Employers “have not even bothered to look” at British workers for vacancies currently filled by EU workers, Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith has said.

We have 150,000 who wouldn’t work even if you paid them. Cut the dole and bus them to the berries.

Andy Mac

It was a ludicrous situation that EU migrants got paid benefits for children who have never set foot in the UK. Utter nonsense and should have been stopped before it was allowed to start.

I know you know

“A lot of employers simply have not even bothered to try and find UK people to work,” he said. “A lot of potential UK employees simply have not even bothered to try and find work,” he should have said, and continued: “This is probably due to them receiving too much in benefits – oh, wait a minute...”

Localnumberfife

For a Conservative, IDS seems to have a very weak grasp of one of the basic laws of capitalist economics – supply and demand. For the market to function as he suggests there needs to be local demand for the work on offer. That is clearly not the case, these jobs have been available for generations but for many reasons the UK worker is not willing to do this menial type of work.

l’écossais de Narbonne

IDS is talking nonsense. When working at a large food plant near Falkirk who were paying “a living wage” before it was publicised (20% more than the minimum wage), we could not get the locals to come and work; we had a lot of Eastern Europeans, who were great workers.

Eldee