THE Conservative work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, is in the headlines for urging British businesses to hire British workers rather than immigrants. Mr Duncan Smith has been praised to the skies by the Daily Mail (front page headline: "Minister who dares to speak the truth") and criticised by business groups who quickly responded that employers were not to blame for the poor skills and bad attitudes of too many young people emerging from the British education system.

Read charitably, Mr Duncan Smith's remarks were less inflammatory than the headlines. After all, he notes that "of course immigration plays a vital role in our economy when it fills a clear gap in skills". Read quickly, and he is merely asking businesses to give British workers the same breaks as foreign workers, and noting that his elaborate welfare-to-work reforms will be undermined if employers shun unemployed British applicants.

But read Mr Duncan Smith's remarks carefully and they are less neutral than they at first appear (frustratingly, the full speech is not on his department website yet, nor the Conservative website, nor even the website of FAES, the Spanish think tank to which he gave the speech). For all his talk of only seeking a level playing field for native applicants, I think he is hinting that employers are unreasonably shunning Britons. He does not want a level playing field, in short, he wants protectionism (and hang the consequences for struggling British businesses).

Consider these extracts:

Even as our economy starts to pick up again, and jobs are created, there is a real risk that young people in Britain won't get the chances they deserve because businesses will continue to look elsewhere to fill their posts... government cannot do it all. As we work hard to break welfare dependency and get young people ready for the labour market, we need businesses to give them a chance, and not just fall back on labour from abroad... good immigration is managed immigration – it should not be an excuse to import labour to take up posts which could be filled by people already in Britain. That's why we must take tough action on this to tighten the rules on immigration across the major entry routes – work, student visas and family settlement – so that only those who have something clear to offer to the UK are able to come in

That looks neutral enough on first reading. But it is not. Consider that phrase "posts which could be filled by people already in Britain". If the posts could be just as successfully and competitively and productively filled by British applicants, they would be. Instead, British employers complain again and again that they find school-leavers are worse than, say, Polish workers when it comes to punctuality, taking sick leave, numeracy, literacy and customer service skills, and plead with the government to improve schooling. Second, the right "people already in Britain" might be foreign nationals, but I don't think Mr Duncan Smith is using the phrase that way. I think he is implying that British nationals are being pushed to the back of the queue.

It is the same with this call for immigration controls designed so that "only those who have something clear to offer to the UK are able to come in". That sounds reasonable, except that actually he is also cross about immigrants with so much to offer that they routinely outdo British applicants for British jobs. By his own logic, an immigration system that allows in only highly employable foreigners would still not be strict enough.

I have a final beef with this speech. Mr Duncan Smith, being a man who lives in the real world, knows that any number of laws, both European and domestic, prevent British employers from discriminating on grounds of nationality. So he is calling for something that is not going to happen and cannot happen. And yet lots of newspaper readers and viewers of television news are going to come away with the impression that Mr Duncan Smith is saying that this will or should happen: he is after all the work and pensions secretary. When they are inevitably disappointed, their frustration with the political classes can only grow.