You report that Rachel Reeves may well have copied various texts from Wikipedia and other sources, without attribution, for her book on female economists (Report, October 27).
This has already led to criticism in the Tory press that she would be a “copy and paste” chancellor, if Labour wins the election.
Surely there must also be some doubt as to her grasp of the latest technology, given it would have been better (and less likely to have been spotted) to have asked an artificial intelligence chatbot to come up with the relevant wording. Such technology would have been useful in my own university days, when I read out in class what I claimed to be a set of new ideas only for my tutor to stop me, telling me he had “read the (obscure) book” from which I had totally copied my essay. I learned my lesson. Hopefully Reeves will have learnt hers, when recirculating the Blair-Brown (even Thatcherite) economics we can expect if she becomes chancellor in a future Labour government.
Martin Spector
London N2, UK