I’m afraid this is nonsense. Elected officials aren’t irrelevant. The majority of them support this legislation and that is why it got enough votes to become law. You don’t have to like it (I’m not a huge fan either), but it’s a perfectly straightforward case of a popular policy becoming law via the democratic process. A process that’s notoriously imperfect and not guaranteed to yield the best outcome in all cases.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that this law must have come about by sinister machinations just because you don’t think it’s a good law.
The reason I think this is because: 1. I know this first-hand and 2. You have to be completely blind to not see the same thing happen multiple times with multiple laws (this has been happening for decades).
Elected officials are irrelevant because, in this case, they are functionally unable to propose a reasonable alternative. Policy options were presented, all of the policy options offered in this case were to empower Ofcom (again, how old are you? are you unable to think of another situation like this: same thing happened with BoE/PRA in 2010, same thing happened with Border Force creation, same thing happened with illegal immigration where the only functional action presented was to increase Home Office staffing, I can go on and on) so what was the alternative?
You also may not understand what is going on here either: this legislation gave Ofcom new statutory powers but what you might not be aware of is that Ofcom has also been granted through non-statutory instruments significant new powers that interlock with this legislation...who voted on that? Again: media campaign by the powers that be, multiple Home Office ministers have been railroaded into this, Ofcom/security services have been granted new powers (the latter by the back door...again, tell me what that has to do with "social media abuse"? nothing).
Finally, elected officials are mostly pawns. The majority of "them" do not know what is in the legislation. They have been told the PM wants "Molly's Law" passed, so it is passed. Some of the scrutiny was laughable...do you understand that the law has a provision that requires tech companies to provide "end-to-end encryption" that the government can break? To their credit, this was questioned by legislators several times...it wasn't removed from the Bill, despite it obviously being unrelated to anything in the Act. Again, how are you this blind? Do you see why elected officials might be irrelevant if you are so blind?
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that this law must have come about by sinister machinations just because you don’t think it’s a good law.