The "watchdog" is a KC (senior barrister) officially appointed to review the legislation. He's warning that this could be considered hostile activity under the act, which would be a bad thing. In other words, he's criticising the act for being overly broad, a view that most on HN agree with, and his criticisms of it presumably carry some weight, given his official role.
As usual, this has provoked a load of ill-informed knee-jerk rants about the UK government from people who didn't read past the headline. This act is an absolute stinker, but let's maybe criticise what's actually happening rather than some imagined cartoon variant of it.
You see this with "OMG knife-crime is out of control in London" type stories that the US love to run.
It's because we were :
1. a decade or more ahead of the rest of the world in actually collecting knife-crime stats
2. Include in those stats people who were simply carrying the kind of knife that wouldn't even get you noticed elsewhere, let alone recorded in the stats.
And that's even without considering that the weapon of choice in the USA is the firearm.
But you wouldn't beleive it from the headlines.
Back to this story, here we have legislators doing their job of scrutinising, and their open scrutiny is held up against the country.
We could instead have a system where people vote on bills without knowing their contents like the US does.
> We could instead have a system where people vote on bills without knowing their contents like the US does.
UK MPs are quite capable of voting on things they haven't read, and indeed their individual opinions are irrelevant due to the whip system. Voting against the party is a rare, major event and can be punished by expulsion. The US traditionally had less party discipline, as can be seen from certain non-party-line Democrats.