As Churchill pointed out democracy does have something going for it, that it's better than all other methods anyone's ever tried. But that doesn't mean that it's perfect, not by a long shot. And interestingly we've that nice Owen Jones making the point for us:

The Aids crisis was building; more than half the population believed homosexuality was “always wrong”, peaking at 64% in 1987 when just 11% opted for “not wrong at all”; and later that decade the homophobic legislation, section 28, was introduced.

Meaning that under the pure rules of democracy that Section 28 legislation was entirely justified. Indeed, it should have been introduced as it was obviously the majority view of the people. All of which is a problem with democracy: for there are quite obviously times when that will of the majority conflicts with the civil liberties of various minorities. Meaning that we have to decide which we are going to regard as more important, those civil liberties or that will of the majority.

Those times that we have to decide coming in a variety of flavours. We could most certainly gain a majority for the idea that we should string the paedos up without much of a trial. There's actually a substantial campaign to insist that legal protections for accused rapists should be weakened, even to the point (not in the UK thankfully, not yet, but in the Antipodes) that the presumption of innocence should be dropped. Here at home we have a campaign to insist that prostitution among consenting adults must be made illegal: quite clearly a violation of that right to ownership of ones' own body and the income therefrom. And there's been campaigns against the rights of property ownership for most of the past century. A subset of which today is the idea that the shareholders in a company may not decide how much they wish to pay the managers in their own employ (in the name of "equaliteeee" of course).

And the campaign against the arbitration part of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is exactly a complaint that that treaty would insist that governments must obey the law of the land over and above whatever democracy demands as changes.

Jones has provided us there with a useful example of when those civil liberties are more important than whatever it is that the mob thinks. We should remind him of this point when he next, or his ilk, suggests taking away our economic liberties. Just because the Demos can be whipped into howling for it does not make a policy one we should enact.