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Good morning. The Labour party is facing two difficult stories this morning. Some thoughts on both of them in today’s note.
Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Follow Stephen on X @stephenkb and please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com
Driving the day
Rachel Reeves’ new book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, contains examples of apparent plagiarism, including reproduced material from online blogs, Wikipedia, The Guardian and a report foreword by Labour MP Hilary Benn without acknowledging the sources. Soumaya Keynes got the story with George Parker, and you can read Soumaya’s full review of the book here. Here are some of the offending passages.
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 eighteen years and stood at just 0.26 per cent. By the end of Labour’s time in office, in 2010, we were on our way to achieving the 0.7 per cent target. This was down to the political leadership of Tony 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.
Hilary Benn
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 per cent. By the time we left office, we were on our way to achieving the 0.7 per cent 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.
Reeves
Once, when entering a smart restaurant in Boston, she was told that ladies were not admitted in trousers, so she took them off there and then!
The Guardian
Once, entering a smart restaurant in Boston, she was told that ladies were not admitted in trousers. She simply took them off.
Reeves
For her part, Beatrice 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.
Wikipedia
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.
A spokesperson for Rachel Reeves has responded saying: “We strongly refute the accusation that has been put to us by this newspaper. These were inadvertent mistakes and will be rectified in future reprints.”
However, in political terms, this will still have a long afterlife, I think. It will be the thing that Conservative MPs say when they are heckling Reeves in the chamber for a long, long time, and I’m sure there will be at least one gag about it in Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement.
A more dangerous row is brewing in Labour over the UK’s response to the Israel-Hamas war. The Labour leadership is still scrambling to undo the political damage done by Keir Starmer’s LBC interview, in which he said that he believed Israel had a right to withhold power and water from Gaza, a remark it took nine days for him to clarify.
Equally damaging is that the Labour leadership has sought to downplay the extent of the initial error, presenting his clarification as if it were simply the obvious read-across from what he had said on LBC. Frankly, Starmer needed to own the mistake right away.
This is a row with the potential to do real damage to Labour’s electoral prospects. As listeners to our Political Fix podcast will know, my home borough of Tower Hamlets was the political epicentre of that back in the mid-noughties, when George Galloway was able to build a coalition of the liberal-left middle class and the Muslim working class to be elected as the Respect MP for Bow and Bethnal Green. Respect’s de facto successor party, Aspire, still runs Tower Hamlets Council today.
Equally importantly, in close fights between Labour and the SNP in Scotland, these groups of voters can be the difference between a Scottish Labour MP and an SNP MP emerging victorious. Or, if they stay at home, they can mean the difference between a Labour MP and a Conservative one being elected in some parts of the country.
Labour’s challenge here is that on the one hand, Keir Starmer wants to be able to show he is in lockstep with Joe Biden’s White House and the UK’s European allies. On the other, he has to avoid a damaging internal row. For the moment, Biden’s call for “a humanitarian pause” has given Labour something to say that will, I think, hold the party together for a while. But we haven’t heard the last of this row by a long, long way. Muslim Labour MPs demanded the party leadership go further and back calls for a ceasefire in Gaza in “robust” talks with Starmer yesterday.
As embarrassing as our story about Reeves’ book is for the shadow chancellor, she has a form of words that will, I think, prove durable. Keir Starmer is some way off from having a form of words that can manage his party’s divisions over the Israel-Hamas war.
Now try this
If you’ve spent any time in London at all, here’s a great way to sink your productivity: play this free web game and see how many stations in Transport for London’s network you can name. I felt very smug as I raced my way to 48 per cent — then it became something of a slog as I ran out of stations in central, east and north London and instead had to try to puzzle my way through the vast swaths of London that I know nothing about. I’m currently becalmed on 62 per cent — let me know how you get on.
Top stories today
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‘52 weeks? Watch this space’ | Rishi Sunak faces the prospect of a fresh by-election challenge as he hinted on his first anniversary in office that he would not call a general election before next autumn.
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Safety net | Rishi Sunak will seek to reassure the public about the risk posed by artificial intelligence, as the UK government sets out a possible scenario in which advances in automation lead to increased unemployment and poverty by 2030.
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Rail fail | UK ministers did not consult Network Rail before unveiling a £36bn set of proposed transport schemes to replace the northern leg of the HS2 high-speed line.
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Yousaf calls for ceasefire | Humza Yousaf has criticised Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer who have both stopped short of calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, the Herald reports.
