Cameron struggles to unite party after Duncan Smith resignation

British Prime Minister David Cameron faced growing divisions within his party over his austerity measures after the shock resignation on Friday of Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith in protests at cuts to disability benefits.

New Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb was expected to drop the planned £4bn cuts in personal independence payments (PIP) on Monday as open civil war broke out within the ruling Conservative Party over the motives for his predecessor's departure.

Cameron was expected to use his statement on Monday on the last EU summit to assert that his administration was a "one nation" government in a rebuke to Duncan Smith's assertion that government policies were dividing the nation.

The controversial welfare measure was announced by Finance Minister George Osborne in last Wednesday's Budget. Duncan Smith said he could no longer tolerate continued attacks on his departmental spending, claiming that the government's obsession with deficit cutting was too narrow a focus.

Critics pointed out that Duncan Smith had already approved and voted for a £30 a week cut to the Employment and Support Allowance less than two weeks ago, and suggested the high profile eurosceptic was thinking more about the June referendum on Britain's EU membership than the plight of those on benefits and added he was well aware of the PIP cuts ahead of the Budget.

In his parting shot Duncan Smith said Osborne had delivered a “deeply unfair” budget.

“The truth is yes, we need to get the deficit down, but we need to make sure we widen the scope of where we look and not just narrow it down on working age benefits,” he told the BBC on Sunday.

“Because otherwise it just looks like we see this as a pot of money, that it doesn’t matter because they don’t vote for us … This is not the way to do government.”

He insisted his decision was nothing to do with the internal bickering among Conservatives over the EU referendum.
Crabb will now be under pressure from Osborne and the Treasury to find £4bn in savings from elsewhere in his department.

Failure to do so would leave Osborne's already precarious plans to generate a £10bn budgetary surplus by 2020 in tatters leaving him with the unpalatable prospect of implementing draconian cuts in spending or raising taxes.

Both of those options would be electorally catastrophic in the run up to a General Election, which must take place by May 2020.