Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been left red-faced this morning after it emerged parts of her new book on women and economics were plagiarised.
Analysis by the Financial Times revealed entire sentences and paragraphs had been stolen from other sources without credit.
Such sources include Wikipedia, The Guardian and a paper by fellow Labour MP Hilary Benn.
More than 20 examples were discovered by the FT, who chose manual checks over plagiarism detection software.
Ms Reeves’s publishers have now admitted that citing source material “did not happen in every case”.
The Shadow Chancellor’s book also includes paragraphs and sentences where the content is almost identical to other source material, but with names and adjectives changed.
Perhaps most embarrassingly, while the book claims to promote women economists and how they shaped Ms Reeves’s thinking, some biographical text about those economists was lifted wholesale from Wikipedia.
A spokesperson for Ms Reeves has since said they “strongly refute the accusation that has been put to us by [the FT]”.
They said: “These were inadvertent mistakes and will be rectified in future reprints.”
Ironically, one of the book’s themes is about women not receiving credit for their work or ideas.
The newspaper examples a biography in Ms Reeves’s book: “Lawrencina was the daughter of a Liverpool merchant, Lawrence Heyworth, whose own family had been weavers in Bacup in Lancashire.”
The sentence is exactly the same as on Wikipedia, bar the spelling of Lawrencina.
They also found an example of an entire paragraph about the relationship between H.G. Wells and the economist Beatrice Webb, which is almost word-for-word the same as found on Wikipedia.
A report by Hilary Benn for the Tony Blair Institute is also ripped off by Ms Reeves.
Ms Reeves is to host a book launch this evening, including a Q&A.
While tickets for the do are officially being sold for £30, earlier this week she was discovered using a “seat-filler” website which gives away tickets for free in order to bulk up the audience size.
