Shadow chancellor’s Rachel Reeves’s new book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, was meant to put the spotlight on unsung female economists. Instead, the focus has fallen back on Reeves herself – and not for the reason she hoped.
Reeves has denied plagiarism after it emerged that the book is littered with passages from other sources, including Wikipedia, apparently lifted without proper acknowledgment. The Financial Times found more than 20 examples of bits in the book with glaring similarities to text from elsewhere.
Reeves wasn’t even as savvy as the average GCSE student
This is clearly very embarrassing for Reeves, whose office has said ‘These were inadvertent mistakes and will be rectified in future reprints’. But there is more to this than a story about whether or not Reeves did borrow a bit too liberally from Wikipedia. What this debacle seems to me to confirm is that Reeves doesn’t have an original thought in her head, nor any real understanding of economics, so she is reduced to copying stuff out instead.
One particular passage of Reeves’s book has a striking similarity to a foreword written by her Labour colleague Hilary Benn in 2021. Back then, 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.’
And here’s Reeves:
‘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.’
Oh dear. Reeves was no doubt hoping The Women Who Made Modern Economics would burnish her credentials as a leading progressive thinker, someone with the vision and depth to remake the British economy. Instead, it appears Reeves wasn’t even as savvy as the average GCSE student, who at least knows to credit text if you use it from elsewhere, or, if not, change a few words before handing it in. For Reeves, who has been praised by the likes of Mark Carney for her brilliance as an economist, it is all acutely embarrassing, especially as one of her main themes is that the women she is writing about have not received enough credit for their work.
Borrowing writing from elsewhere without properly attributing it is wrong, of course, and Reeves should not have let it happen, and neither should her publishers. But the story confirms what many of those who have watched Reeves’s rise in British politics suspected. For all the praise she receives on the Davos circuit, she is someone who all too often parrots whatever fashionable guff will make her look ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’.
Reeves copies her industrial strategy from president Biden, her fiscal policy from the Office for Budget Responsibility, and her employment policies from the TUC. But she doesn’t have any ideas of her own, or any understanding of what she is proposing might actually mean.
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