Rachel Reeves has said she holds her hands up and acknowledges making mistakes in her new book about female economists after she faced allegations of plagiarism.
The shadow chancellor admitted on Thursday that some sentences in her book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, were “not properly referenced in the bibliography”.
An examination by the Financial Times of the book found more than 20 examples of passages from other sources that appeared to be either lifted wholesale, or reworked with minor changes, without acknowledgment.
The sources cited by the paper included an obituary from the Guardian, several Wikipedia entries and a passage from a fellow Labour frontbencher.
Basic Books, the publisher, said some sentences should have been “rewritten and properly referenced” and pledged to review all sources in the book, but added that “at no point did Rachel seek to present these facts as original research”.
It said: “There is an extensive and selective bibliography of over 200 books, articles and interviews. Where facts are taken from multiple sources, no author would be expected to reference each and every one. When factual sentences were taken from primary sources, they should have been rewritten and properly referenced. We acknowledge this did not happen in every case.”
Speaking to BBC Broadcasting House, Reeves said: “It is true that there were some sentences in the book that were not properly referenced in the bibliography. I’m the author of that book, I hold my hands up and say I should’ve done better.”
Asked if the errors were a result of her being too busy, she said: “Obviously I had research assistants on the book, but I take responsibility for everything that is in that book.
“What I wanted to do was to bring together the stories of these women, and if I’m guilty of copying and pasting some facts about some amazing women and turning it into a book that gets read then I’m really proud of that.
“I will put this right because in any future reprints I will make sure that everything is properly referenced in the bibliography, that is important to me and I will put right those mistakes.”
The FT pointed out that one of the themes of the book was the failure to properly acknowledge the work of female economists.
The book was launched on Wednesday night at a party in Carlton Gardens attended by 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 was 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’ book says: “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 included an account of a clash between the writer HG Wells and Beatrice Webb, the social reformer and key figure in the Fabian Society.
Reeves’ book says: “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.”
