Mr McNulty on the Bill


Also from the Standing Committee debate. The Minister encapsulates the Bill. Alastair Carmichael MP had pointed out that fixing names in the register is difficult when names are so variable, his own being Alexander on his birth certificate:

Regarding the legal issues raised by the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland—something-or-other Carmichael, but that is his business—there are other legal elements in Scottish and English law that need to prevail. The hon. Gentleman should not worry; we will tell him in the end what his name is.

Joking? Not very funny, is it?


0 thoughts on “Mr McNulty on the Bill

  • John Lettice

    Some years back, at the time when Korea had fairly recently come out of dictatorship and started moving towards democracy, I got into a conversation with a Korean about names. He complained that British names were a problem for him because there were so many people with the same name, Smith, Jones etc.

    I replied that this was a bit much coming from a Korean, considering the number of people called Park, Chung, Lee… “Except for you,” I added. “How come you’re called ‘Ree’ anyway?” Well, actually, he admitted, he WAS called Lee, but that when he’d applied for his passport they’d made a mistake and put him down as Ree. And he thought it prudent not to argue with the authorities…

  • Tony Oates

    I’m sure the hon Member isn’t so hapazard with his name when dealing with government business or the Inland Revenue.

    Perhaps the hon. member is just putting the case for adding Biometric Data even DNA.

  • Guy Herbert

    That hardly follows. Mr Carmichael was making the point that he is currently entitled to be known by whatever name he wishes, and does not require government permission. Hansard, the official record of a sovereign parliament, records him as Alastair Carmichael, at his choice.

    There is no doubt about his entitlement to sit in the House of Commons, practice at the Scottish Bar or conduct any other business, despite the fact that the Home-Office-dream, authoritarian-presumption, pigeonholing-bureaucratic-fundamentalist conception of “identity” as a partition of all official record bijectively related to a human body immediately fails in his case.