British minister quits over cuts to disability benefits

Britain’s welfare minister Iain Duncan Smith resigned on Friday over planned reductions in welfare payments for people with disabilities in a blow for Prime Minister David Cameron.

Mr Smith, one of six senior ministers who broke ranks to back Brexit in the upcoming EU membership referendum, blamed finance minister George Osborne in a scathing letter.

“Changes to benefits to the disabled and the context in which they’ve been made are a compromise too far,” he wrote in a letter, following uproar against the plans announced by Mr Osborne in Parliament this week.

“They are not defensible in the way they were placed within a budget that benefits higher-earning taxpayers,” said Mr Smith, who had been in his post since 2010 and led the Conservative Party between 2001 and 2003.

He said the government’s aim of cutting the deficit by 2020 was “more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest.”

Mr Cameron said he was “puzzled and disappointed” by Mr Smith’s decision to resign.

“I regret that you have chosen to step down from the government at this time,” Mr Cameron said, in a letter to the former minister made public by Downing Street, adding that the government had agreed to review the controversial welfare reform.

Meanwhile, Mr Cameron made Stephen Crabb the new secretary of state for work and pensions, shifting him from the Wales secretary job in the Cabinet, Downing Street said in a statement.