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Hello and welcome to Political Thinking with Nick Robinson.

If voting changed anything they'd abolish it, that joke has rarely seemed less true than

it does this weekend.

The results of the Hartley Pool by-election will surely change the Labour Party, either

making or breaking, not just Kia Starma, but the project of making Labour re-electable.

I can't remember a moment since the late 80s and the early 90s, when the question of

whether Labour can win again seems more urgent.

And I had a sense of that.

When Steve Reed, the party spokesman on local government and communities, was put on to

the today programme just minutes after the result in Hartley Pool and instead of trying

to explain it away, instead of insisting you had to see it in context, admitted it had

been little short of a disaster.

There's no hiding from the fact this is a shattering result for Labour, absolutely

shattering.

And for a town like Hartley Pool, it's been Labour.

We have a breach of trust between too much of the British electorate and the Labour Party

and we haven't done enough to repair it over this past year.

Within minutes of the result, the warring Labour factions were firing off their version

of events onto social media.

There was either too much Corbinism or not nearly enough.

It felt to me very like the war that used to happen in the Tory party.

...