The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has been accused of apparent plagiarism in her new book about female economists.
An examination by the Financial Times of the book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, found more than 20 examples of passages from other sources that appear to be either lifted wholesale, or reworked with minor changes, without acknowledgment.
The examples cited by the paper include an obituary from the Guardian, several Wikipedia entries and a passage from a fellow Labour frontbencher.
The book’s publishers, Basic Books, admitted that sentences in the book were not properly referenced. Reeves’s office denied plagiarism but acknowledged that errors were made and said they would be corrected.
A spokesperson told the FT: “We strongly refute the accusation that has been put to us by this newspaper. These were inadvertent mistakes and will be rectified in future reprints.”
Basic Books pointed out that the book includes a bibliography from more than 200 sources. It told the FT: “Where facts are taken from multiple sources, no author would be expected to reference each and every one.”
The FT pointed out that one of the themes of the book was the failure to properly acknowledge the work of female economists. It was launched on Wednesday night at a party in Carlton Gardens that included several members of the shadow cabinet, including Wes Streeting and Hilary Benn.
A 2021 foreword to a report on global development by Benn, for Tony Blair’s Global Change thinktank, is one of the excerpts that appears to have been reworked in the book without acknowledgment. Benn wrote: “When we were elected in 1997, the amount of aid we gave as a proportion of our national income had halved over the preceding 18 years and was just 0.26%. By the time we left office, we were on our way to achieving the 0.7% target. This was down to the political leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who brought the lives of the world’s poorest people into the heart of Whitehall.”
Reeves’s book says: “When Labour was elected in 1997, the amount of aid the UK gave as a proportion of our national income had halved over the preceding 18 years and stood at just 0.26%. By the end of Labour’s time in office, in 2010, we were on our way to achieving the 0.7% target. This was down to the political leadership of Blair and Gordon Brown – and their first secretary of state for international development from 1997 to 2002, Clare Short, who brought the lives of the world’s poorest people into the heart of government.”
The FT also found a passage in Reeves’s book about the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe that is very similar to an obituary published in the Guardian in 2001.
The obituary, by Jane O’Grady, says: “Once, entering a smart restaurant in Boston, she was told that ladies were not admitted in trousers. She simply took them off.”
Reeves writes: “Once, when entering a smart restaurant in Boston, she was told that ladies were not admitted in trousers, so she took them off there and then!”
The FT reported that it found the similarities without using plagiarism detection software. It cited a number of examples from Wikipedia. These include an account of a clash between the writer HG Wells and Beatrice Webb, the social reformer and key figure in the Fabian Society.
Reeves writes: “For her part, Beatrice voiced disapproval of Wells’s ‘sordid intrigue’ with the daughter of a veteran Fabian member. He responded by lampooning the couple in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli as Altiora and Oscar Bailey, a pair of short-sighted, bourgeois manipulators.”
The Wikipedia entry on Webb says: “For her part, Beatrice voiced disapproval of Wells’ ‘sordid intrigue’ with the daughter of a veteran Fabian Sydney Olivier. He responded by lampooning the couple in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli as Altiora and Oscar Bailey, a pair of short-sighted, bourgeois manipulators.”