Many people have criticised the bill, with some even going as far as to defining it as a "
Pandora's box for Britain's poorest families". The cuts to tax credits have been criticised for unfairly affecting the working poor, and a clause in the bill allows the benefits cap of £20,000 (£23,000 in London) to be reduced further, without any further consultation with Parliament (apart from the passage of the act through parliament), thus making those from larger families even worse off.
Harriet Harman, then interim leader of the
Labour Party, required Labour MPs to abstain from the vote for the bill as opposed to voting against it (a move which US-based magazine
The Nation said "underline[d] Labour's moral and intellectual bankruptcy".) However, the Labour Party was in the process of choosing a new leader at the time, and one candidate associated with the party's left-wing, the eventual new leader
Jeremy Corbyn, voted against the bill along with 48 of his Labour colleagues who also defied the Labour whip. Other parties in opposition to the bill were the
Scottish National Party (who said that the Bill was "...an attack on civil society, it's an attack on our poorest and hard working families, and it's a regressive Bill that takes us back in time with cuts that will hit women and children the hardest"), the
Liberal Democrats, the
Democratic Unionist Party (Northern Ireland),
Plaid Cymru and the
Green Party of England and Wales. == Notes ==