Shadow Chancellor admits ‘mistakes’ after Wikipedia plagiarism claims
The Labour MP said she held her 'hands up' to the plagiarism allegations.
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves says she ‘holds her hands up’ and admits making ‘mistakes’ following claims she plagiarised large chunks of her new book from Wikipedia and other sources.
The Labour MP had faced accusations of ‘copying and pasting’ text and passing it off as her own words in her book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics.
Speaking to the BBC today, the Ms 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.’
When asked if the ‘mistakes’ were made because she was too busy, she replied:
‘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 allegations of plagiarism were first made by the Financial Times, after its journalists found significant sections lifted from other sources with no acknowledgement.
The FT said Ms Reeves’ book – which is about women whose ideas have shaped modern economics – featured uncredited and copied material from Wikipedia, The Guardian and remarks made by Labour MP Hilary Benn.
A sentence on the relationship between HG Wells and economist Beatrice Webb is exactly the same as one from Wikipedia, which reads: ‘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.’
Elsewhere in the book, Ms Reeves, who hopes to be the next chancellor, wrote: ‘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% cent 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 except is lifted almost word for word from a foreword to a report on international development by Hilary Benn, published on the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change website.
Following the FT’s report, Conservative Party chairman Greg Hands described Ms Reeves as a ‘copy and paste shadow chancellor’ following the report.
Posting on X, formerly Twitter, he said the situation was ‘potentially very serious’, and used several resignations by German ministers over plagiarism accusations since 2011 as an ‘example; of what can happen’.
Ms Reeves’ publishers, Basic Books, said in a statement that ‘at no point did Rachel seek to present these facts as original research’.
It added: ‘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.’
The publishers said all sources in the book would be reviewed and any omissions rectified in future reprints.
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