Once we had New Labour: now we have Changed Labour. As part of Sir Keir Starmer’s bid to prove that his party is different (honest!) since the far-off Corbyn days of, er, April 2020, Labour has been out today banging the drum for business. The Opposition is terribly proud of itself for stitching together a letter of support for its economic policies, signed, no less, by some of the country’s leading business experts. What a coup!
But Mr S could not help but wonder about some of the names signing the letter that Rachel Reeves touted today in her big speech in Derby. For one thing, there were no FTSE 100 company chief executives putting their pen to paper – perhaps out of fear of Angela Rayner’s trade union package. Yet Steerpike was struck by one of the names who actually did back Reeves: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and husband of former Blair aide Kate Garvey.
His website of course is not actually a business but rather a charitable foundation, run by the Wikimedia Foundation out of San Francisco and which operates as a ‘non-commercial website.’ Still, perhaps it is no surprise that Reeves chose to tout the endorsement for a site which demands its readers stump up donations. After all, she did choose to borrow a decent chunk of her book from the site, with examples easily available here. As the Financial Times noted back in October:
Most of the instances of copied phrasing contain biographical information. For example, “Lawrencina was the daughter of a Liverpool merchant, Lawrence Heyworth, whose own family had been weavers in Bacup in Lancashire” is written both on Wikipedia and in Reeves’s book. The two versions differ only in their spelling of Lawrencina.
Ouch. Talk about what goes around, comes around eh?
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