SHADOW chancellor Rachel Reeves is "holding her hands up" amid accusations of plagiarism – and her publisher has said future editions of her new book will be revised.
The Labour frontbencher initially hit back at the accusations but has now acknowledged making mistakes in The Women Who Made Modern Economics.
It comes after the Financial Times said it had found that parts of her work had been lifted from other books, articles and from Wikipedia.
The shadow chancellor admitted yesterday that some sentences were "not properly referenced in the bibliography".
Reeves, who could become the UK's first female chancellor if Labour win the next election, promised to "put right those mistakes" if the book is reprinted.
However, she added that if she is “guilty of copying and pasting” facts about “amazing women”, she is “really proud of that”.
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."
At an event in Westminster yesterday, Reeves also admitted parts of the work had been written by “research assistants” who had drawn on “a range of sources” including Wikipedia.
Speaking at the Institute for Government, she said: “I wanted to carve out time to write this book. In the acknowledgements, I acknowledge the research assistants, particularly on the facts and the detail that went into the pen portraits of the women that I speak about.
“That came from a range of sources, from books, from interviews, from articles, from Wikipedia.”
Manual checks carried out by staff at the Financial Times are said to have found more than 20 instances where text is directly reproduced from elsewhere without acknowledging the original sources.
One example cited by the Financial Times, which this paper has verified, appears to have lifted almost word-for-word from the Wikipedia article for Beatrice Webb, the co-founder of the London School of Economics.
The section in the book reads: “For her part, Beatrice [Webb] 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 article reads: “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.”
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A spokesperson for Reeves told The Telegraph: “These were inadvertent mistakes, and will be rectified in future reprints.”
Reeves’s publisher Basic Books said: “At no point did Rachel seek to present these facts as original research. 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.
“As always in instances such as these, we will review all sources and ensure any omissions are rectified in future reprints.”
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