Britain's opposition Labour Party is struggling to regain its balance after suffering one of its worst election results in modern times.
Shocked by the extent of the loss, leaders are trying to figure out how to rebuild the party and regain the public's trust. There is turmoil everywhere.
The country's biggest union and top funder has signaled it will have its say in the leadership contest and a front-runner for the job quit just days after launching his bid. Its leader in Scotland won a confidence motion but resigned anyway.
"Today the Labour Party stands at a crucial juncture - either we realize how bad our defeat was, learn from that and advance," Mark Ferguson, editor of the LabourList blog, wrote in a commentary.
"Or we deny the scale of our electoral, cultural and emotional rejection by the British people, curl up into a ball and, slowly but surely, slip out of existence."
Labour, as the name implies, is supposed to be the party of the working man, and woman a left-leaning organization with the unions at its core.
The unions actually created the party over a century ago to promote its causes in Parliament.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair made great efforts to unshackle the links when he became leader in 1994. His decision to move the party to the center so-called "New Labour was a recognition that the country had changed fundamentally.
The original foundations of the Labour Party were no longer there as the steelworks closed, the shipbuilding yards were shuttered and the coalmines abandoned.
Attracting the middle classes was the mantra of Blair's years at the helm. His party's comfort with wealth creation and its insistence that income taxes would not be raised worked Labour won three consecutive election victories under Blair, something it had never done before.
The changes Blair instituted sat uneasily with many in the old ranks of Labour, who thought the party had moved too far away from its core principles. Ed Miliband, who led the party to its defeat on May 7, tried to bridge the gap and introduced a series of modest but headline-making tax-raising plans.
But his strategy didn't work and the party remains divided and it shows. Labour won 232 seats in the May 7 election, 26 fewer parliamentary seats than in 2010 when Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, lost heavily in the wake of the global financial crisis.
Labour's current plight is best-exemplified by its collapse in one of its supposed heartlands, Scotland, where it lost all but one of its 40-odd seats.
