Is the majority free to misuse power?

IT may very well be that the majority who voted to leave Europe wished, as Roy Frost suggests (Nov 6), in good faith to give us back our freedom of “making choices of our own, instead of being told what we can or can’t do with our own laws” etcetera, etcetera.

But the more I hear some of them fiercely argue for “the will of the majority” and “the will of the people”, and how these are paramount considerations to which a “beaten” minority has to give quiet assent, the more I feel that we are about to blindly fall into what the French diplomat, political scientist, and historian Alexis de Tocqueville (De La Démocratie en Amérique two volumes, 1835, 1840) called the “tyranny of the majority” in which individual rights, especially those of the minority, are compromised.

“A majority taken collectively may be regarded as a being whose opinions, and most frequently whose interests, are opposed to those of another being, which is styled a minority.

“If it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wrongdoing his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach?

“Men are not apt to change their characters by agglomeration; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with the consciousness of their strength. And for these reasons I can never willingly invest any number of my fellow-creatures with that unlimited authority which I should refuse to any one of them.”

Is there any reason that we should be more sanguine about what we see happening as a result of the Brexit vote than de Tocqueville was about what he saw in the 1830s in America? I think not. Kevin Cryan Radford