This article examines the ways in which Labour's thinkers and leading politicians since the 1930s were attracted to single and to multiple explanations and solutions. The writing of historians and political philosophers on the Labour Party's thought has tended to focus on thinkers' approach to particular values, especially equality, or to the relationship and prioritisation between specific values, such as equality and freedom. This article, in contrast, explores not the values themselves but to what extent one single value (or one single explanation of social problems or one single policy prescription) was deemed to be special or sufficient, and also when and why single answers were deemed insufficient and in need of broadening through the embrace of multiple (that is several or various) values and explanations, and the adoption of certain syntheses of these. The article, then, is concerned with ideological dimensions and breadth more than ideological content. In being so, the article seeks to facilitate scrutiny of a variety of often neglected aspects of the history of Labour's thought, including the roles of simplicity, complexity and the mundane. In particular it examines the claim of some socialists to be pursuing radicalism or progress through the range of their values and not only through fidelity to particular individual values. The article additionally asserts that the focus on the content of ideas and assumptions to the frequent exclusion of analysis of those ideas' breadth and dimensions is also a feature of historical writing on modern Britain more generally.
